Question: Is there a vaccine for malaria

Sophie Adjalley answered on 7 May 2020: last edited 7 May 2020 2:06 pm

Hi Harvey, thank you so much for your very valid question!
There is a lot of work being done to develop a vaccine that would either block the parasites before they reach the liver or prevent them from developing in and destroying red blood cells, which is what makes people sick. Developing a vaccine against malaria has been particularly difficult, because the malaria parasites continuously modify the proteins they transport and place at the surface of the red blood cells to avoid being recognised by the immune system.
So far, the vaccines have been unsuccessful at providing enough protection against the diease. However, there is one licensed malaria vaccine called RTS,S that has shown some effect in pilot studies, which are small studies taking place in countries directly affected by malaria. The idea here is to test the efficacy of the vaccine in protecting children against malaria. The vaccine specifically recognizes and inactivates a protein only produced by the parasite. Unfortunately, several injections are necessary to reach a good level of protection and not over a very long period of time, which makes it less than ideal or practical if you will, as a vaccine.That being said, this is a vaccine scientists have been developing for more than 30 years and work on improving.
Another avenue that researchers are exploring is the use of what we call live-attenuated parasites, which are parasites that are still alive but have been modified so that they can’t properly infect people. These inactivated parasites can stimulate the immune system and protect people against real infections, but the problem is that often you need a lot of inactivated parasites to generate an immune response or in some cases, the parasites are not completely inactivated and can still trigger the disease, which is a huge issue!