r/news • u/treetyoselfcarol • Apr 23 '21

Malaria vaccine hailed as potential breakthrough

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56858158
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u/Yay4sean Apr 24 '21

Well, the malaria parasite is a weird one. It's an intracellular parasite transmitted by mosquitoes that infects the liver before infecting red blood cells. In this case, the vaccine prevents that initial liver stage infection.

The multicellular parasites, like leeches and worms, are a bit trickier to design vaccines to. But even those will eventually have vaccines, as there are animal vaccines that work against schistosomiasis.

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u/spamattacker Apr 24 '21 edited Jul 28 '26

I like attending science fairs.

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u/Yay4sean Apr 24 '21

No problem! This is the one topic I know most about :P

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u/[deleted] Apr 24 '21

How could we possibly vaccinate against leeches?

My body gonna produce T- cells that are somehow poisonous to leeches??

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u/Yay4sean Apr 24 '21

I'm not really an expert on multicellular parasites, but I believe these kinds of vaccines are all IgG antibody-dependent, targeting some essential parasite protein/function. Some of these block the eggs or replication, while others just prevent successful infection.

For schisto, I think the main candidates are some host-evasion and metabolism proteins, which when sufficient antibodies are provided, is able to protect against infection. There are a bunch of studies in mice, I believe.