Scientists Overcome Major Hurdle in P. vivax Vaccine Development

A new blood-stage malaria infection model helps solve a problem hindering research. Transcript The world urgently needs new drugs and vaccines to eradicate malaria. Whilst there's good headway against P. falciparum - the deadliest form of the parasite –research into P. vivax - the second deadliest – lags behind. Why? Researchers lack stable cultures of the parasite needed to infect people to test the efficacy of drugs and vaccines. We need a way of doing this reliably and an international team of researchers has come up with a way: the blood-stage malaria infection model. They first collected blood samples of a P. vivax strain in Thailand, fed the samples to mosquitoes and transported these mosquitoes to the UK, where they were used to infect two adults. Those volunteers then had their blood collected before being treated, and this blood was used to infect another six adults. This new blood-stage malaria infection model will help to test drug and vaccines more easily in the future. Source Controlled human malaria infection with a clone of Plasmodium vivax with high quality genome assembly About The Podcast The Johns Hopkins Malaria Minute podcast is produced by the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute to highlight impactful malaria research and to share it with the global community.