Our Mission

Sanaria’s primary mission is to develop and commercialize whole-sporozoite vaccines that confer high-level, long-lasting protection against Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria parasite responsible for more than 95% of malaria associated severe illness and death world-wide and the malaria parasite for which there is the most significant drug resistance. The overall mission includes developing vaccines that prevent all human malaria.

Why Malaria Vaccines Matter

Malaria is a serious concern for billions of people living in malaria endemic areas and for travelers including military. Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) malaria caused >249 M clinical cases and 608,000 deaths in 2022, and is thought to be responsible for losses of >$12 B annually in Africa.

Pf sporozoites (SPZ) are found in mosquitoes and infect humans during mosquito feeding. The excellent protective efficacy in humans of weakened (attenuated) PfSPZ has been known for >40 years. More than 80% of subjects were protected for 10 months when attenuated PfSPZ were administered by ~1,000 mosquito bites. However, immunization by mosquito bite is not a practical vaccine approach.

Sanaria has spent more than a decade addressing the challenges of production, purification, cryopreservation, delivery, and administration of PfSPZ, and has an extensive domestic and international patent portfolio covering these innovations.

PfSPZ have been incorporated into well tolerated, safe, efficacious, easily injectable PfSPZ-based vaccines. Vials of aseptic, purified, cryopreserved PfSPZ vaccines are manufactured in compliance with regulatory standards. Several candidate vaccines are in clinical development:

• Sanaria® PfSPZ Vaccine, in which PfSPZ are attenuated by irradiation;
• Sanaria® PfSPZ-CVac, in which infectious PfSPZ are attenuated by concomitant administration of an anti-malarial drug; and
• Sanaria® PfSPZ-GA1 and PfSPZ-LARC2, in which PfSPZ are attenuated by genetic alteration.