Researchers aim to use mosquitos to bite back at malaria

A US scientist is leading an international team of researchers using an army of blood-sucking mosquitos to produce a potentially potent vaccine against malaria.

Stephen Hoffman, 58, founded Sanaria Inc., a biotech firm solely dedicated to the production of a vaccine against malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that kills one million people a year, many of them African children.

Hoffman officially opened a manufacturing facility on Friday in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Maryland, where he said he aims to produce 75 to 100 million doses a year to vaccinate the 25 million infants born every in year in sub-Saharan Africa.

“The opening of this facility is an important step in the process to develop a whole-parasite malaria vaccine,” he said.

At his lab, researchers feed mosquitos capable of transmitting malaria to humans with blood contaminated with Plasmodium falciparum. Two weeks later, the parasites spread into the mosquitos’ intestines and then to their salivary gland.

The mosquitos are then delicately taken to a new chamber where they are briefly treated with radiation to weaken the parasites.

Researchers extract the weakened parasites and purify them. Used in the vaccine, the weakened parasites trigger an immune reaction powerful enough to protect against malaria more than 90 percent of the time for at least 10 months, Hoffman said.

Rockville, Maryland, Sunday, AFP