Wheat germ cell-free technology for accelerating the malaria vaccine research

Abstract

Background: Malaria causes about 300 million illnesses and 1 million deaths annually. The likeliest scenario is the aggravation of this disease due to the re-emergence of drug-resistant parasites and insecticide-resistant mosquitoes. One of the promising solutions to this disease are vaccines. However, until now, not even a single licensed malaria vaccine has been developed despite intensive efforts. Even the efficacy of RTS,S, the most advanced vaccine candidate in the pipeline of malaria vaccine development, is only around 50%. Objective: Against this backdrop, there is an urgency to rapidly enrich the pipeline of vaccine development with novel vaccine candidates that can be discovered by synthesizing and screening a multitude of malaria proteins. Methods: However, to achieve this objective, we require optimal technologies for high-throughput synthesis of quality malaria proteins. Among the various protein synthesis systems, the wheat germ cell-free protein synthesis system is advantageous and successful to this end. Results/conclusion: The wheat germ cell-free protein synthesis system is optimal for accelerating the decoding of malaria genome and hence characterization of malaria proteins and discovery of malaria vaccine candidates.

Keywords::

• malaria
• Plasmodium falciparum
• post-genome
• vaccine candidate discovery
• wheat germ cell-free protein synthesis

Acknowledgements

The authors thank K Kato, A Tamai and M Tasaka for their technical assistance.