IT’S going to be fiddly work, but the saliva glands of mosquitoes are to be used as mini factories for churning out a novel vaccine against malaria.
The vaccine is based on the whole parasite, rather than individual proteins, and may therefore work better than other vaccines in development because the body can mount a multi-pronged attack against it. “That’s the ideal,” says John McNeil, scientific director of the not-for-profit Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI).
The mosquitoes that transmit malaria do so because they are infected with immature sporozoites of the parasite Plasmodium falciparum. These travel from the mosquitoes’…
