Malaria Vaccine Being Developed In Rockville

>

From Sanaria

Recently, Bill Gates made headlines when he released mosquitoes during a presentation to dramatize the danger that malaria poses to humanity. It is a scourge of many nations in poverty, killing almost 1 million people per year (mostly children in West Africa). Many philanthropists are mobilizing to combat it.

Here in Rockville, biotech firm Sanaria is hard at work creating an unconventional vaccine for malaria. Just five years ago, Sanaria’s quest was scoffed at as impossible.

“We were dismissed by 99 percent of the people in the malaria field,” says Sanaria CEO Dr. Stephen Hoffman. But just two weeks ago Sanaria received the FDA go-ahead to start human trials of their new vaccine.

What’s different about this vaccine? It’s made from living malaria parasites. According to the St. Augustine Record:

In the Navy in the 1990s, Hoffman irradiated malaria-carrying mosquitoes to weaken the parasites inside them, and he and 13 colleagues subjected themselves to more than 1,000 bites. Usually malaria parasites race to the liver and multiply before invading the bloodstream to sicken. These weakened parasites instead sat harmlessly in the liver, unable to multiply but triggering the immune system to fend off later infections. All but one of the people in Hoffman’s test, himself included, were immune when bitten by regular malaria-infected mosquitoes over the next 10 months.

As we have written before, Rockville is an amazing crossroads of technology. This is a very interesting example.

Share and enjoy:

Hide Sites