Scientists Tap Genetically Modified Parasite To Fight Malaria

A new study uses malaria parasite to fight malaria promises a new way to create a powerful vaccine against a disease that killed 429 million people in 2015 and affects 200 million people around the world each year.

According to Science Mag, parasitologist Stefan Kappe at the Center for Infectious Disease Research in Seattle, done a test in mice, injecting a genetically attenuated parasite or GAP of malaria. The rodent showed completely protected from infection after being given with an unmodified Plasmodium strain.

Also, human tests have been done. Researchers infects 150 to 200 mosquitos with GAP designed for P. falciparum and let these insects spread the parasite to 10 human volunteers. The researchers discovered that among the human volunteers, there was none developed a malaria or suffered any serious harm. The vaccine triggered the antibodies to resist against the sporozites.

Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease affecting humans and animals alike and it is caused by a group of single-celled microorganisms, parasitic protozoans, belonging to the Plasmodium type. From the mosquito bite, the parasites will travel to the liver through the blood stream where they mature and reproduce. A person infected with malaria usually shows symptoms like fever, fatigue, vomiting and headaches. In severe cases, it can cause yellow skin, seizures, coma or even death.

Per Pri.org, the strategy of the study was to weakened the organism to train the body's immune response against the full-strength version, similar on how the polio virus vaccine are being formulated. But weakening the parasites are more challenging than attenuating a virus. "Virus is a much less complex organism", Stefan Kappe pointed out.

Kappe said that usually, the methods of weakening viruses like polio have not been very controlled. Viruses were passed through tissue or tissue culture and they are just weakened in the process, and then they are made as vaccines.

However, Kappe and his team used an engineered approach to debilitate the parasitic organisms that causes malaria. They picked the genes that are important for the parasite to grow in the liver and delete those genes using genetic engineering procedures to unable the parasite to replicate after initial infection.

Malaria's continued toll is not for lack of prevention research which the advanced vaccine targeting a protein in malaria-causing parasites to be piloted in Africa in 2018 but rather, in a phase 3 trial of vaccine's efficacy ranging from just 27 to 39 percent in infants and young children.

Stefan Kappe and his team hopes that the new vaccine will not only work, but be more effective than other vaccines targeting just one or few of the parasites thousand proteins.