Japan to develop world's first malaria vaccine

25 June, 2004
 

Tokyo, June 25 (VNA) - Japan's Osaka University will team up with the World Health Organisation (WHO) to develop the world's first malaria vaccine.

Due to no available vaccine to prevent malaria outbreaks, malaria patients are currently treated only after being infected by the deadly disease, local media reported.

To develop preventive medicince against a type of malaria transmitted by parasites called Plasmodium falciparum, Prof. Toshihiro Horii at the Osaka University's Research Institute for Microbial Disease and his team plan to begin clinical tests in November.

Horii and other researchers confirmed that antibodies against "SERA", a type of protein that appears in malaria-infected red blood cells, would kill malaria parasites.

Four WHO experts will also join to test the vaccine on some 45 people in Japan. They plan to conduct tests on the vaccine in Uganda, where many suffer from the disease, in May 2005, and then in Indonesia in January 2006.

They would probably use the antibodies in developing a vaccine after confirming that they can be used safely in animals.

There are several types of malaria transmitted by parasites. One transmitted by Plasmodium falciparum causes serious symptoms such as high fever.


About 100 million people, many of them in the tropics, show symptoms of malaria each year, of which more than one million die from the disease.--Enditem