Scientists may soon find if a malaria vaccine protects Malian children from malaria
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Malaria drugs and vaccines will help African children live healthier lives.
Credit: WHO/TDR/Stammers |
As malaria drug resistance increases, improving existing malaria drugs becomes an urgent, life-saving health priority. NIAID grantee, Christopher V. Plowe, M.D., M.P.H., Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Center for Vaccine Development , University of Maryland School of Medicine, has developed molecular markers to monitor the resistance of the malaria parasite to two of the most important malaria drugs of the 20th century—chloroquine and sulfadoxinepyrimethamine. Using this information, he and his colleagues created strategies to extend the useful life of those drugs. The rapid molecular tests they developed to document drug resistance are now available for scientists worldwide to use in their own research.
Dr. Plowe is continuing his work in laboratories in the United States and Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2008, he co-lead a clinical trial in Mali that found that a candidate malaria vaccine was safe and elicited strong immune responses in the 40 Malian adults who received it. The NIAID trial was the first to test this vaccine, designed to block malaria parasites from entering human blood cells, in a malaria-endemic country. Based on these promising results, the research team is now conducting trials of this vaccine in 400 Malian children aged 1 to 6 years old. The scientists will soon learn if the vaccine was protective in the children.
Across the continent in Malawi, Dr. Plowe discovered that the molecular marker for chloroquine resistance progressively declined after 1993, when the country ceased using chloroquine because the failure rate of the drug was greater than 50 percent. An NIAID-supported clinical trial conducted in 2005 showed a return of chloroquine efficacy to 99 percent. Today Dr. Plowe and his colleagues at the University of Malawi College of Medicine are testing chloroquine in combination with other antimalarial drugs in an effort to find ways to make drug combinations that are "resistant to resistance."
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