Union makes force: combining vaccines results in up to 91% of reduction in Malaria incidence

Álvaro Nieto Blanco, Lucia Pardinas Del Águila, Victoria Perales Arroyo and Patricia Pérez Guijorro

June 19, 2018

A team led by Imperial College London has taken the initiative in a field that promises to continue helping our fight against disease, by combining two different and experimental vaccines against malaria with increasing success. These are a transmission-blocking vaccine and a pre-erythrocytic vaccine (TBVs and PEVs respectively).

One of them works on the vector, mosquitos in this case, by preventing them from transferring the Plasmodium spp responsible of the disease (these parasites stay in the mosquito midgut and salivary glands till they get into the host and distribute trough the blood torrent, causing liver damage). The other one prevents the microorganism from infecting the liver of the host.

The effectiveness of this combination has been tested with great results. Separately, these vaccines can reach a 48% and a 68% of efficacy respectively, but together they make up to a 91% of decrease in animal studies.

As Dr. Andrew Blagborough states, this could be a great step forward in the prevention of malaria, a life-threatening disease that kills up to 1.2 million people annually, with special relevance in undeveloped rural areas of the African continent.

The efficacy of current lead malaria vaccines is known to reduce over time, so the next question to be asked is how these combined vaccines will ultimately do.

Keywords: #malaria #vaccine #parasitology

Imperial College London. (2018). Combining different malaria vaccines could reduce cases by 91 percent. ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180619123020.htm. Last visit: September 21st 2018.