$1.8million in funding to combat malaria
Scientists at Victoria University of Wellington’s Ferrier Research Institute are working on developing new drugs and vaccines to combat malaria—a mosquito-borne disease that can cause flu-like symptoms. Left untreated, there is a risk of severe complications and even death.
In 2016, there were an estimated 216 million cases—almost 3% of the world’s population—of malaria and, of those, 445,000 people died—mostly children in Africa.
“Drug development is expensive, and pharmaceutical companies consider this, and the potential for commercial returns, when choosing where to put their research efforts. While this has hampered efforts to find a cure, it also highlights the value of universities and research institutes who have an opportunity to pick up the challenge,” says Ferrier Research Institute’s Deputy Director, Professor Gary Evans.
Earlier this year, Ferrier Research Institute was awarded funding by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop new antimalarial drugs.
This research will be led by Ferrier’s Professor Peter Tyler who will collaborate with Professor Tom Meek’s group from Texas A&M University, and Professor Vern Schramm, from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. They will receive around $1.8m of funding over the next 5 years. This research will not only be focused on the development of an anti-malaria drug but will also attempt to create new therapeutic treatments for Chagas’s disease and African sleeping sickness.
“Malaria, Chagas’s disease and African sleeping sickness are all neglected tropical diseases, which currently have un-met or under-met medical treatments,” says Professor Tyler. “We’re going to target three parasitic protozoa, which cause the diseases. One of which is Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes the most virulent form of malaria, and the others are Trypanosoma cruzi and Trypanosoma brucei, which cause Chagas’s diseases and African sleeping sickness respectively.”
History of success
This new project builds on a decade of research into antimalarial strategies undertaken at the Institute and isn’t the first time Professor Tyler has been involved in the development of anti-malarial drugs. In 2011, in collaboration with Professor Vern Schramm and with funding from Medicines for Malaria Venture, he developed an antimalarial drug that showed potential to cure malaria in seven days. “Medicines for Malaria Venture has a policy of one pill a day for, at most, three days and preferably one, so this drug hasn’t yet been progressed,” says Professor Tyler.
He hopes that with this new funding, the Institute will be able to develop a drug that requires a smaller dosage.
Developing a vaccine
As well as developing an anti-malarial drug, researchers at the Ferrier Institute are also looking at an anti-malarial vaccine.
This work is being led by another Ferrier researcher, Professor Gavin Painter, in collaboration with the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research and the University of Melbourne and in partnership with Avalia Immunotherapies.
“When someone is bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito, parasites are released into their skin. These parasites travel to the liver, undergo the first stage of replication and then re-enter the blood. That’s when the disease manifests so, theoretically, halting parasite growth back when they’re in the liver should prevent disease progression.”
“Previous vaccine research has attempted to utilise antibodies to combat malaria. However, antibodies aren’t able to access the liver stage of the parasite.”
Professor Painter and his team are looking at an alternative approach – a vaccine that generates ‘cellular or T cell immunity’. “We have developed a fully synthetic vaccine that induces particularly strong T cell responses against liver-stage malaria. The vaccine works by targeting a specialised population of the immune cells in the liver, known as innate-like T cells.”
“This alternative could be combined with more traditional vaccine approaches to potentially develop the world’s first effective vaccine for malaria.”