TU Scientists Discover Potential Vaccine for Malaria

 

Scientists from Singapores Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have discovered a key process during the invasion of the blood cell by the malaria parasite, and more importantly, found a way to block this invasion.

With this new knowledge, NTU is looking to collaborate with the industry on a vaccine against Malaria which can be developed within the next five years if accelerated by vaccine development companies, says lead scientist professor Peter Preiser.

Preiser, chair of NTUs School of Biological Sciences, said his teams scientific breakthrough, which was published last month in the journal Nature Communications, will be instrumental in paving the way toward eradicating malaria in the long run.

According to the World Health Organization, about 3.3 billion people half of the world's population are at risk of malaria. This mosquito-borne disease causes fever and headache and in serious cases, can cause a patient to go into a coma or result in death.  The disease infected about 219 million people in 2010, and kills around 860,000 people worldwide annually.

If there can be a low-cost vaccine which is effective in rendering the parasite harmless, then millions of lives can be saved and this will also benefit the economy by millions of dollars each year, says Preiser.

What we have identified is a region of the malaria parasite which it uses to attach to a healthy blood cell then pushes itself into the cell, says the parasitic diseases expert.

To prevent this invasion, we developed antibodies which can interfere with this invasion process. So imagine the parasite has the key to unlock a door to the red blood cell, but we muck the key up, so no matter how hard the parasite tries, the door just refuses to open.

The patented discovery also opens the doors to new drug targets, which will allow scientists to develop more methods to interfere and disrupt the parasites act of invasion.

Preisers research team of six from NTUs School of Biological Sciences includes a post-doctoral researcher, three doctoral students and one undergraduate student.

They spent five years on this study. This research outcome was made possible with the development of a new screening assay that allows the rapid characterization of parasite signalling, which is significantly faster than conventional methods.

The newly invented technique utilizes a high-throughput fluorescence scanning approach if antibodies or drugs fail to prevent the invasion of the red blood cell by the malaria parasites, the sample will light up. If the antibodies work, then the sample remains dark. This allows for rapid characterization of thousands of compounds as well as antibodies for their ability to interfere with the invasion process.

Moving forward, the NTU team will be using their new technique to identify other antibodies which can target the different components of the Malaria parasite, and potentially lead to future treatment and vaccine breakthroughs for the fatal malaria disease. They are also looking to collaborate with industry partners to develop new vaccines based on their latest discoveries.

Source: Nanyang Technological University