The amazing thing about the healthcare community is that it is constantly evolving, revamping, and discovering new ideas. Even you can someday be the founder of a life-changing discovery or magical cure that alters the state of the world! Dream big, folks.
In recent years, immunologists have been working to further improve a malaria vaccine, and they just might have struck gold. As we all know from class, malaria is transmitted to humans via infected Anopheles mosquitos and is a life-threatening, possibly deadly disease that damages red blood cells. There is currently no recommended malaria vaccine as the only one available to get, RTS,S, is kind of crappy. RTS,S, according to recent reviewed Precision Vaccination post, has a very low effectiveness rate, especially in children (towards whom malaria is most fatal). Malaria, can however, be avoided somewhat by antimalarial medication before exposure.
According to an article by Oregon Health and Science University, a new type of vaccine combating malaria has surfaced and is currently being studied. Cytomegalovirus (CMV) vaccines are being studied to determine their effectiveness in vaccinating for malaria, HIV, and TB, and so far, results have been promising. According to the article, a paper published by PLOS ONE journal indicates that CMV-based vaccines reduce the malaria parasite’s “release from the liver and into the blood of infected rhesus macaques by 75 to 80 percent”. This is great news because if it worked so well on monkeys it should on humans too. The article mentions that the CMV vaccine is a great improvement from the short lifespan (aka not very effective) of the RTS,S malaria vaccine. What I found especially interesting about this newly studied vaccine is that it is a weakened form of CMV, a common herpes virus, and it does not cause sickness to those vaccinated. According to the same Precision Vaccination post mentioned previously, CMV-based malaria vaccines are really getting the health community (and myself) excited because of its long lasting effects, which is always highly sought after. As promising as this research may sound, I highly encourage further testing and development before getting too convinced; perhaps this vaccine could cause health problems years after getting vaccinates, or could lead to further complications in currently healthy individuals.
Perhaps the reason why we don’t have a solid malaria vaccine yet is because malaria is caused by a protozoan parasite, Plasmodium. Most common vaccines you may know of (chickenpox, flu, or MMR) are viral. Maybe protozoans infections are that much harder to make into an attenuated/inactive/protein/etc vaccine, and still ensure optimum effectiveness. Nevertheless, the effectiveness and creativeness of this innovative CMV-based vaccine gives me hope that we are on the right track to eliminating malaria before it eliminates us.
Microbiology for Smarties 