Blood-stage malaria vaccines: post-genome strategies for the identification of novel vaccine candidates

ABSTRACT

Introduction: An efficacious malaria vaccine is necessary to advance the current control measures towards malaria elimination. To-date, only RTS,S/AS01, a leading pre-erythrocytic stage vaccine completed phase 3 trials, but with an efficacy of 28–36% in children, and 18–26% in infants, that waned over time. Blood-stage malaria vaccines protect against disease, and are considered effective targets for the logical design of next generation vaccines to improve the RTS,S field efficacy. Therefore, novel blood-stage vaccine candidate discovery efforts are critical, albeit with several challenges including, high polymorphisms in vaccine antigens, poor understanding of targets of naturally protective immunity, and difficulties in the expression of high AT-rich plasmodial proteins.

Areas covered: PubMed (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) was searched to review the progress and future prospects of malaria vaccine research and development. We focused on post-genome vaccine candidate discovery, malaria vaccine development, sequence diversity, pre-clinical and clinical trials.

Expert commentary: Post-genome high-throughput technologies using wheat germ cell-free protein synthesis technology and immuno-profiling with sera from malaria patients with clearly defined outcomes are highlighted to overcome current challenges of malaria vaccine candidate discovery.

KEYWORDS:

• Antibody profiling
• malaria vaccine
• Plasmodium falciparum
• post-genome
• protein array
• reverse vaccinology
• wheat germ cell-free protein synthesis system

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by Strategic Promotion of International Cooperation to Accelerate Innovation in Africa by MEXT, and JSPS KAKENHI (JP25460517, JP26253026, JP26670202, JP26860279, JP15H05276, and JP16K15266), Japan.