Sanaria’s In Vitro Produced Sporozoites Highlighted in Vanguard News
Scientific research gets ground breaking progress on malaria vaccines
By Ezra Ukanwa
SCIENTISTS have made headway on infectious malaria sporozoites produced without mosquitoes for malaria vaccines and biology research.
In a statement signed by the Chief Executive Officer, CEO, Sanaria, Dr. Stephen L Hoffman, the Sanaria Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) sporozoites (SPZ) vaccines have conferred the highest protective efficacy against Pf infection and longest durability of protective efficacy without boosting of any malaria vaccine.
He said that PfSPZ vaccines are currently manufactured in mosquitoes under conditions that meet international regulatory standards.
“By developing the capacity to produce infectious PfSPZ in vitro, meaning in culture vessels without the need for mosquitoes, we have made the critical, first, breakthrough steps for enabling manufacturing scale up to eventually meet the needs of the hundreds of millions to billions of people, especially those at high risk in Africa, who would benefit from our PfSPZ vaccines.
“The importance of this high impact article is already being recognized in significant citations and press coverage outside the scientific community. We are focused now on further improving the technology to bring it to compliance for human use and are actively seeking investment to move us forward as rapidly as possible”, he said.
He further explained that the ability to culture the malaria parasite’s blood stages that cause disease and transmit to the mosquito was hugely influential in advancing parasite biology and providing essential tools for vaccine development.
He said: “The capacity to routinely produce PfSPZ in vitro is equally game-changing” said Dr. Pedro Alonso, Professor of Global Health, University of Barcelona, and previous Director of the Global Malaria Program at the World Health Organization, “as it will accelerate our ability to interrogate the biology of this poorly understood stage of the malaria parasite that is normally transmitted to people through the bites of infected mosquitoes.”
He added: “The paper describes, for the first time, completion of the Pf life cycle without the need for mosquitoes and characterizes the comparative biology of in vitro PfSPZ with those produced in mosquitoes at cellular, molecular and functional levels through gene expression-, antigen expression-, morphological- and infectivity studies.
“We are proud of the contributions of our malaria vaccine research team led by Dr. Stefan Kappe in the Center for Global Infectious Disease Research on this ground-breaking work,” added Dr. Eric Tham, senior vice president and chief research operations officer at Seattle Children’s. “We look forward to exploring future collaborations with Sanaria, building on this technology to produce highly protective, genetically attenuated PfSPZ vaccines.”
President of the Swiss Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Marcel Tanner, emphasized the importance of this major report, saying that “the methodologies presented in this pivotal publication pave the way for Sanaria to truly address this unmet need with technologies that are not only scalable but readily transferable to any country in the world wanting to manufacture PfSPZ vaccines, making production of a malaria vaccine in Africa for Africans a realistic possibility.”
Original article can be accessed here.
