Vaccine for malaria being tested

[Teej]

From BBC News:

Human malaria jab tests nearing

A type of malaria vaccine for humans is to be tested, following the success of trials undertaken with animals. There is currently no vaccine for the illness, which kills between two and three million people every year.

Oxford University scientists, part of an international team, reported, in the journal Nature Medicine, that its virus-based jab worked well in mice. Initial small-scale human safety trials of the vaccine are now expected to start next year. The method involves two viruses, a common cold virus (adenovirus) and a pox virus, both of which have been engineered to be harmless in themselves, but to produce a protein on their surfaces which matches one found on the outside of the malaria parasite. When an injection of the adenovirus was followed eight weeks later by the pox virus, the results in mice were clear-cut. The vaccines produced two separate types of powerful immune response to these malaria "antigens", hopefully priming the immune system to respond aggressively when confronted by the malaria parasite later on. In mice, it reduced the growth of the parasite by between 70% and 85%.

Dr Simon Draper, from Oxford University, said: "In the end, the results were startling, and we could use these viruses to induce very high levels of antibodies for the first time." He said that the viruses did not require any extra chemical to be given at the time of inoculation to boost their function, and were potentially easier to grow, and therefore cheaper to mass-produce.

These latest results, had allowed the team to secure extra funding from the Medical Research Council for next year's safety trials. Professor Alister Craig, from the Liverpool School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that a working vaccine remained some way off, but the immune response delivered in the mice was an "important step forward". "It remains to be seen how 'generalised' this delivery system will be using other antigens and in humans but it is a significant addition to the field."

Source

I edited it down a little bit due to length, the link has the full story though. Hope they're not just getting people's hopes up, and it's disappointing that it's still a few years away from even possibly being put to widespread use. But it still sounds somewhat promising, and if it's cheap to mass produce then hopefully we could get it to the countries that are hit hardest by malaria relatively easily.