Malaria

Jay Keasling of Zagaya in the U.S. will explore the production by an endophytic fungus of artemisinin, a key ingredient in malaria treatments. If the fungus produces artemisinin in the absence of light, an enzymatic mechanism is likely involved. This mechanism could be harnessed for a new production method to reduce treatment costs for malaria patients in developing countries.

Ichiro Matsumura of Emory University in the U.S. proposes to use synthetic DNA techniques to transform Wolbachia, a bacterial parasite that infects most insect species, in an effort to engineer mosquitoes to be immune to malaria parasites.

David Segal of the University of California, Davis in the U.S. will develop a high-throughput screen to search for artificial transcription factors (ATF) that are candidates to treat P. falciparum infections. ATFs could be a gene-regulating drug resource for the study and treatment of malaria.

Christian Ockenhouse of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the U.S. and Alan Cowman of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Australia seek to generate a transgenic P. falciparum malaria parasite that can be used to assess the efficacy of P. vivax-based circumsporozoite vaccines.

Agenor Mafra-Neto of ISCA Technologies, Inc. in the U.S. will test whether an artificial lactic acid treatment (called abate) can trick disease-transmitting insects such as mosquitoes into infecting animals rather than their preferred human hosts, thereby reducing infection rates. Malaria-causing parasites are carried by mosquitoes, which identify the human hosts that help them reproduce by detecting the high levels of lactic acid in human perspiration.

Louis Schofield of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Australia will develop a synthetic saccharide-conjugated vaccine that would provide immunity against GPI, a toxin produced by the malaria parasite that is a major determinant in the severity and fatality of the disease. This project's Phase I research demonstrated preclinical safety and efficacy of a synthetic anti-toxin vaccine for malaria, showing that the oligosaccharide target was conserved across all malaria species and life stages.

Kasturi Haldar of the University of Notre Dame in the U.S. will rapidly screen malaria parasite genes that are essential for invasion and growth in human red blood cells. Characterizing these proteins may reveal novel vaccine targets for blood stage infection.

Guang-hong Tan of Hainan Provincial Key Laboratory of Tropical Medicine in China seeks to create a next-generation malaria vaccine by deleting a gene responsible for parasite development in the liver adding a new gene which attracts dendritic cells to the infection site. Using this modified sporozoite in a vaccine could produce a limited infection that, at the same time, induces a strong immune response against malaria.

Margaret Njoroge and Thomas Egwang of Med Biotech Laboratories in Uganda will develop and test an intranasal vaccine to be administered to young women before pregnancy, and again after childbirth, to confer anti-malarial immunity in their babies.

Shahid Khan of Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands seeks to produce a multi-stage malaria vaccine using transgenic sporozoites. These parasite forms will also present transmission blocking antigens to not only generate protective immunity against early stages of infection, but also generate antibodies to block transmission via mosquitoes.