Malaria Vaccines Successful in Early Trials

Malaria infects more than 200 million people a year, killing 400,000 annually. Headway is being made to combat the disease, however. Dr. Benjamin Mordmueller and Professor Peter Kremsner recently announced in Nature that their PfSPZ-CVac vaccine has proven one hundred perect effective on nine adults who were given the maximum dose of the vaccine, according to IFLScience.com. Some of the other participants in the trial were given smaller doses and also developed immunity.

Participants were injected with the vaccine and then given a dose of chloroquine – a medication used to prevent and to treat malaria. Ten weeks later, “those given the full dose were still showing immune responses considered sufficient to prevent malaria infection,”IFLSciene.com reports. Unlike previous trials, this vaccine contains fully viable malaria pathogens. By doing this “it seems clear that we were able to set off a very strong immune response,” Mordmueller said in a statement. 

A different published trial, led by Dr. Robert Seder of the National Instutitues of Health. This vaccine used an attenuated parasite – or a parasite that has been weakened enough to not make participants sick. Nine out of 14 people given the vaccine proved resistant to the same strain of the parasite 19 weeks later. Although this vaccine doesn’t quite match the success of PfSPZ-CVac, the use of an attenuated pathogen make the vaccination safer.