Research shows a new vaccine candidate against malaria.

Researchers have discovered a promising new strategy to fight malaria, a mosquito-borne parasite that kills nearly half a million lives each year, and for a study reported in Nature magazine, researchers looked at blood samples from children who were natural Had immune resistance to a severe malaria infection.

The study identified an antibody to a specific malaria protein called PfGARP, which appears to protect resistant children from serious illness.

Laboratory tests have shown that antibodies to PfGARP appear to activate a malaria-causing self-destruction mechanism, so that parasite cells that live in human red blood cells experience some form of programmed cell death. The team hopes that vaccinating people with PfGARP to form anti PfGARP antibodies or the direct infusion of anti-PfGARP antibodies would protect them from severe malaria.

The team developed preliminary versions of these vaccines, and tests on non-human primates have shown promise, “we have shown in two independent studies on non-human primates that PfGARP vaccination protects against a deadly malaria parasite,” said the leader Study author Dr.

Jonathan Kurtis, professor at Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University and laboratory director at the Center for International Health Research at Rhode Island Hospital.

The exciting thing is that it is a vaccination strategy that fights malaria in a way that has never been attacked before – one in which the parasite becomes an accomplice to its own downfall.

We hope that this vaccine, perhaps in combination with other malaria antigens, will lead to a strategy that can help prevent severe malaria in humans. ”Testing a human vaccine is probably years away, the researchers say, and there is no possibility….

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