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Two scientists studying malaria at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute (SBRI) have been awarded Grand Challenges grants, and they join the less than three percent of researchers whose proposals were funded.
Patrick Duffy, a physician from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, is the director of SBRI's Malaria Antigen Discovery (MAD) Program. The program's goal is to identify molecules on the malaria parasite, called antigens, that may serve as vaccine targets. Duffy has been offered a $19 million, five-year grant to identify the immune responses that prevent severe disease and death due to malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum. Duffy and his colleagues in Tanzania and worldwide will investigate why some children with malaria suffer severely while others have a natural immunity. The scientists aim to identify parasite forms that cause severe disease in children and the antibodies that may protect them.
Stefan Kappe, a researcher in the MAD program, has been offered a $13.5-million, five-year grant to develop a whole-organism, live P. falciparum
vaccine that has been weakened by deleting genes crucial to its development in the liver, where malaria infection begins. Kappe co-authored a study published last January in Nature demonstrating that such a vaccine induced immunity in rodents, but he used the related species Plasmodium berghei. Kappe and his colleagues intend to start clinical trials in humans if similar results are achieved with a P. falciparum vaccine. There is still a long way to go in Kappe's goal of producing a genetically attenuated whole-organism malaria vaccine and he himself admitted to the New Yorker's Michael Specter, "I would never have received funding for this particular project–any classical review mechanism at NIH would have come back and said no, too far-out. The Gates people know it's far-out. But sometimes far-out works."
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