Question: Is the protein in Maleria that you are targeting the Heme Detoxification Protein? And does this mean that the vaccine would contain heme in order to kill the protein?

Ailsa Powell answered on 20 Jun 2011:

Hello – sorry it’s taken a while to answer your question – the Iron zone got bombarded on Friday afternoon with a mountain of questions and it’s taken a lot of time to work through them and give proper answers 🙂

I don’t work on the heme detoxification protein. But it is a good target for development of antimalarial treatment.

I work on a family of proteins that are involved in the signalling in the parasite; they cause the parasite to do things like progress to the next stage of it’s life cycle, or enter red blood cells.

There a lots of scientists all over the world investigating all different aspects of the malarial parasite, finding out as much as possible about how it works and the differences between human cellular processes and parasite cellular processes. This is so we can find as many different treatment options as possible. The reason for this is we don’t know what will ultimately succeed as treatment and also how long these new treatments will be viable before the parasite becomes immune to them.