the soul of a new vaccine

The sign on the wall reads “Emergency Response Procedures for a Mosquito Release.”

Among them are “Do Not Leave the Room or Open Any Doors!!!” and “Do Not Panic!”

Everything in the room is white, including the lab coats and surgical masks - for sterility, yes, but also the better to see a mosquito. Hanging next to the sign, in vivid Coast Guard orange, is the last line of defense, a brace of fly swatters.

This room, the mosquito dissection lab, in an unassuming biotech park in the Washington suburbs, is at the heart of one of the most controversial ideas in vaccine science.

Sanaria Inc. (meaning “healthy air,” a play on the Italian “mal’aria” or “bad air”) is making a vaccine the old-fashioned way, more or less as Louis Pasteur did.

Avoiding modern recombinant DNA technology that injects tiny fragments of parasite protein to prime an immune response, Sanaria uses the whole parasite, extracted by hand from the mosquito’s salivary glands, and weakened so it cannot multiply.

Pasteur weakened rabies and anthrax bacilli by air drying them. Sanaria uses gamma rays.

Because the world now fights malaria - ineptly - with nets, insecticides and drugs, a vaccine is desperately needed.

As many as 70 experimental ones exist around the world; eight rival projects are being supported by the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which was created in 1999 with money from the Gates Foundation.

Sanaria’s is the sole vaccine using the whole parasite. Injected into a capillary, it rides the bloodstream to the liver and starts making proteins. But after about three days, it stops, and it never floods the blood with copies of itself.

Radiation-weakened parasites have protected many lab mice and a handful of humans, but making a vaccine that can be mass produced is a huge challenge.

Read Full Story at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/health/research/
11mala.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

Source: The New York Times
Date: 11 December 2007