A multicomponent high-efficacy malaria vaccine

Exceptionally potent immune responses targeted at key antigens have been required to achieve even partial vaccine efficacy against malaria. A number of advances in recent years have provided the prospect of greatly improved antibody-inducing vaccine components, through the use of both transgenic parasite technology and mass-spectrometry-based sequencing of parasite antigen screening. Professor Hill aims to build on these exciting advances to design and develop an effective multicomponent vaccine against Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria. He aims to do this by: investigating whether a more protective liver-stage vaccine against P. falciparum malaria can be identified by assessing antigens using transgenic parasite technology combined with sequencing of parasite peptides; investigating whether this liver-stage vaccine can be improved by combining it with a new anti-sporozoite vaccine; and investigating whether these components can be efficiently integrated with anti-blood-stage and anti-sexual-stage vaccine components to develop a highly effective multicomponent malaria vaccine.