When Dr. Sebastian Mikolajczak joined Seattle’s Center for Infectious Disease Research eleven years ago, he had a job to do: create a vaccine for malaria.
Easier said than done.
Although malaria is rare in North America and Europe, it kills well over half a million people each year, largely in poor, tropical and sub-tropical countries. One of the main issues with preventing and treating the disease is that it is caused by a parasite, much more complex than the viruses and bacteria that cause other infectious diseases.
But Mikolajczak and other researchers at CIDR believe they have found the answer: they have created a vaccine by carefully altering the parasite’s genetics, making it unable to infect people. The result is called a genetically attenuated parasite, or GAP.
Today, the results of the first human trial of the GAP vaccine were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, and they are a resounding success: the vaccine was found to be safe to use in humans, and effective in producing the immune response needed to fight off malaria.
“This paper is mostly to establish that this method and this parasite is safe, that you can introduce the vaccine into people and they will never develop Malaria just by giving them the vaccine,” Mikolajczak told GeekWire.
This is the second time the team has tested a GAP vaccine: the prior version infected a study subject with malaria, and was abandoned.
But in the trial of the most recent GAP vaccine, conducted by CIDR and Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, all 10 of the volunteer subjects remained disease free.
The vaccine successfully infected the patients while causing no harmful side effects, all good indicators that mean the vaccine is likely to be successful in later trials.
Mikolajczak told GeekWire that work on a genetically mutated malaria vaccine began decades ago, when scientists discovered that parasites mutated via radiation could make people immune to the disease.
“We were trying to take this method to the 21st century,” Mikolajczak said. Instead of randomly mutating the parasite with radiation, Mikolajczak and other CIDR researchers were able to leverage cutting edge technology to remove three precise genes in the parasite, making it unable to infect humans but keeping it alive to be used as a vaccine.
Mikolajczak said the next step is to run efficacy trials to see if the vaccine can actually protect humans against contracting malaria, and how effectively it can do so. But for Mikolajczak, just making it this far is a triumph against such a tricky competitor.
“At the beginning, at least, you do something and you think that you have a hypothesis that it should work this way or that way, and it doesn’t. In a way, this is kind of depressing because you think you’re an intelligent kind of person, you are a scientist, you’re supposed to predict what will happen, and with this parasite it’s just unbelievable.”
“I think that’s the beauty of it, you just never know what you’re going to get at the end of it.