immunity

The results obtained from the numerical simulations of the model show that a possible vaccination combined with effective treatment regime would reduce the spread of the disease appreciably.

While subunit vaccines have shown partial efficacy in clinical trials, radiation-attenuated sporozoites (RAS) remain the “gold standard” for sterilizing protection against Plasmodium infection in human vaccinees.

We demonstrated a novel vaccination strategy that uses a live transgenic protozoan parasite-based bivalent vaccine to immunize mice and confer significant levels of protection against VV-gag and malarial parasite challenges.

There are ongoing efforts to develop a vaccine based on this system. Attenuation of sporozoites may be achieved via irradiation, genetic modification, or through the use of drugs targeting the blood stage parasite.

This study demonstrates that immunity against MSP133 after cumulative natural infections consists of low-magnitude and difficult-to-detect IFN responses.

Collectively, these data indicate that the suppression of acute P. chabaudi infection by CMI is T cell dependent, is independent of NK cells, and may be attributed to the deficient IFN response seen early in T-cell-depleted mice.

Here, we used surrogate T cell activation markers to identify and track whole-parasite, RAS-vaccine-induced effector and memory CD8 T cell responses. Our data show that the differential susceptibility of RAS-immune inbred mouse strains to Plasmodium berghei or P. yoelii sporozoite challenge does not result from host- or parasite-specific decreases in the CD8 T cell response.

We focus on malaria parasites to illustrate challenges and opportunities for detecting targets of frequency-dependent immune selection to discover new potential vaccine candidates.

This review summarizes the evidence that VSAs are important targets of NAI, discusses why VSA-based vaccines might be feasible despite the extensive intra- and interclonal variation of VSAs, and how vaccines based on this type of antigens fit into the current global strategy to reduce, eliminate, and eventually eradicate the burden of malaria.