Malaria transmission-blocking vaccines: wheat germ cell-free technology can accelerate vaccine development

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Highly effective malaria vaccines are essential component toward malaria elimination. Although the leading malaria vaccine, RTS,S/AS01, with modest efficacy is being evaluated in a pilot feasibility trial, development of a malaria transmission-blocking vaccine (TBV) could make a major contribution toward malaria elimination. Only a few TBV antigens have reached pre-clinical or clinical development but with several challenges including difficulties in the expression of malaria recombinant proteins and low immunogenicity in humans. Therefore, novel approaches to accelerate TBV research to preclinical development are critical to generate an efficacious TBV.

Areas covered: PubMed was searched to review the progress and future prospects of malaria TBV research and development. We also reviewed registered trials at ClinicalTrials.gov as well as post-genome TBV candidate discovery research including our efforts.

Expert opinion: Wheat germ cell-free protein synthesis technology can accelerate TBV development by overcoming some current challenges of TBV research.

KEYWORDS:

• Malaria
• transmission-blocking vaccine
• Plasmodium falciparum
• post-genome
• 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

Reviewer Disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers [JP25670202, JP15K08444], Global Health Innovative Technology Fund [grant number GHIT T2016-207], the Takeda Science Foundation, and the Intramural Research Program of NIAID, NIH. The funding sources had no role in study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, and publication