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| Photo courtesy QIMR |
A vaccine to prevent one of the world’s biggest killers – malaria – is being developed by one of Queensland’s leading research teams and may be ready for clinical trials next year.
Malaria, which is mosquito-borne, is primarily responsible for up to two million deaths each year, with most victims under the age of five. The disease is expanding outside its traditional boundaries, according to the US-based Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, making the need for an effective vaccine particularly critical.
Scientists believe that global warming makes northern Queensland more vulnerable to dangerous tropical diseases, including malaria, which is endemic in Papua New Guinea.
"Malarious countries suffer severe poverty and extremely low economic growth," Professor Michael Good of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research said.
"A 2000 study by the Harvard University Centre for International Development estimated that, if malaria had been eradicated 35 years earlier, the annual Gross Domestic Product for Africa would be $US100 billion more than it is today – a figure which dwarfs the international aid given to Africa each year."
Professor Good leads a team at QIMR that has adopted a novel approach to the challenge of creating an effective vaccine and results have been promising. Human clinical trials should begin in the next year, Professor Good said, with most pre-clinical work completed. "We’ve just about got all the ducks lined up," he said.
Professor Good said that previous efforts to develop a vaccine had resulted in only partial protection. And, while natural immunity can be developed, it is only partial and takes several years to acquire.
"The novelty of our approach is that it uses a small portion of the parasite to make the vaccine which, in animal studies at least, can protect against infections of different strains of the parasite instead of targeting just one of them," he said.
"This is very exciting, because other vaccines target only one strain and the parasite had learned to evade immune response."
Professor Good said previous researchers had assumed that massive and very costly doses of a vaccine would be needed to be effective but the QIMR work indicates that only a very small dose is effective.
"That means we can produce the vaccine in large quantities because it’s not hard to make."
Last reviewed 29 January 2007