For the first time in human history, vaccines will be developed inside the bellies of live mosquitos.
Started in Stephen Hoffman?s kitchen five years ago, Sanaria Inc. opened a new lab facility Friday that seeks to provide a 90 percent effective vaccination against malaria, a disease that claims almost a million children each year and was once thought impossible to vaccinate against.
“It?s one of the biggest accomplishments in medicine in my lifetime,” U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Maryland, said. “Right here in Rockville, this company is moving forward with a vaccine that has the potential to eradicate malaria. That?s huge.”
Sanaria, in partnership with the international PATH Malaria Vaccination Institute (MVI), will begin Phase I clinical trials early next year.
“We have a long way to go before we?ll have a vaccine to control and, we hope, eradicate malaria,” Hoffman said.
His work ? built on early small-study trials and $45 million in backup research over the last four years ? showed that people infected by irradiated mosquitos could be vaccinated by receiving weakened forms of the parasite. The irradiated forms cause an infection and immune reaction, but can not reproduce and continue the malaria life cycle.
In the first test, 14 out of 16 people exposed to the bites of more than 1,000 mosquitos showed resistance to malaria for at least 10 months, Hoffman said. At least four patients showed resistance to seven different strains of malaria.”
Sanaria?s vaccine would not be the first, said MVI Director Christian Loucq, but an international effort is needed for an enemy as complex as malaria. “We don?t know if any one strategy is going to be effective to get to the 80 percent effectiveness that people expect from a vaccine.”
GlaxoSmithKline published results in The Lancet this week showing that their malaria vaccine prevented 65 percent of new infections within three months and 35 percent in a six-month follow-up period.
The difference with Sanaria?s model, Hoffman said, is its answer to malaria?s complexity. Compared with viruses, which may have 10 to 20 genes, the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which causes the deadliest strains of malaria, has 5,300 genes. While other vaccines present the body with a handful of genetic fragments, the live parasite gives the whole picture.
“We?re exposing the immune system to thousands of proteins at once,” he said. “There?s enough redundancy there so you won?t have to worry about genetic variations of the parasite.”
