A new approach to malaria vaccination
Malaria is a devastating disease that affects the most vulnerable populations in the globe. It is caused by Plasmodium parasites, of which P. falciparum is the deadliest, and is transmitted by female mosquitoes, when they bite in search of a blood meal. For decades, researchers worldwide have been trying to find an effective vaccine against that which has been called the “scourge of the developing world”. Unfortunately, we are not quite there yet and the most advanced candidate in the pipeline only affords very modest levels of protection. In the beginning of the century, renewed hopes for malaria vaccination arose from the resurgence of whole-sporozoite malaria vaccines, which had been all but forgotten in the previous decades, despite offering the strongest protective efficacy ever observed in malaria vaccination. In this work, we propose an unconventional approach to the development of a new type of whole-sporozoite malaria vaccine.
