Last Updated: 18/06/2024

A pathway to a live-attenuated whole parasite malaria vaccine

Objectives

The proposal sets to advance a scalable method that produces pure, highly-infectious parasites that offer robust immune protection into a pipeline for parasite purification, vaccine formulation and vaccine production that has potential for good manufacturing production.

Principal Investigators / Focal Persons

Jacob Baum

Rationale and Abstract

Malaria kills half a million children each year. Despite decades of investment, there is still no efficacious vaccine. To date, the best protection achieved against malaria came from injecting volunteers with live parasites, attenuated so they don’t cause disease. However, translation of this approach has performed poorly in field trials, largely because of the laborious nature of isolating pure parasites from mosquitoes, a process that requires skilled manual dissection. A revolutionary, dissection-independent process for malaria parasite isolation, extracting them from thousands of pulverised, infected mosquitoes has been developed. By reducing costs and improving the effectiveness of whole-parasite vaccines the aim is to reinvigorate malaria vaccinology providing a pathway for protecting children from disease.

Thematic Categories

Vaccines (Immune Correlates)

Date

Sep 2020 — Aug 2022

Total Project Funding

$961,795

Funding Details
Wellcome Trust, United Kingdom

Grant ID: 220503/Z/20/Z
GBP 715,680
Project Site

United Kingdom

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