Low cost anti malaria vaccine produced by algae

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, claim to have successfully produced an anti malaria vaccine from engineered algae in mice, according to the physicist's organization network on May 17 This kind of vaccine is easy to produce and low cost, and is expected to become a powerful weapon against malaria The paper was published on the website of PLoS general on May 17 Malaria is a global acute parasitic infectious disease caused by Plasmodium and transmitted by Anopheles Worldwide, nearly 500 million people are threatened by the disease every year, and the death toll is between 1 million and 2 million Although some vaccines can prevent infection, they cannot be widely used in susceptible areas because of their high price Stephen Mayfield, a professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, who led the study, said that one of the challenges in making an anti malaria vaccine is to find proteins that can produce complex three-dimensional structures similar to those produced by parasites, so that the human body can produce antibodies and disrupt the spread of malaria At present, most vaccines are made of simple proteins produced by engineering bacteria Complex proteins can also be produced, but they need to be cultured in mammalian cells, and the process is complex and expensive In addition, a process called glycosylation occurs in the process of artificial production, which makes the surface of these proteins attach a layer of sugar The parasites that cause malaria produce complex proteins, but they don't allow sugar to attach to them "If you have a sugar coated protein and you inject it as a vaccine into someone, these vaccines will fight against sugar rather than the harmful proteins that invade the body." Said Mayfield To solve this problem, researchers have tried to make vaccines from sugar free bacteria and then fold them into the correct three-dimensional shape, but the effect is not ideal Then they turned their attention to an edible green algae called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, which, like flies and E coli, is widely used in the laboratory Previous studies have shown that Chlamydomonas reinhardtii can be used to produce complex proteins such as monoclonal antibodies and growth hormones This attracted the attention of James Gregory, a postdoctoral researcher working in the Mayfield laboratory, who imagined that the above problems would be perfectly solved if complex proteins could be produced through algae At present, the most difficult thing to fight malaria is that the production cost of anti malaria vaccine is high, while the cost of algae is not only low, but also can grow almost anywhere on the earth with water, whether in the pond or in the bathtub Researchers from the Mayfield team then worked with the school's tropical disease expert, Joseph Vince, to create an anti malarial vaccine using this method, and conducted experiments on mice in the laboratory The results showed that the antibody produced in the mice successfully prevented the spread of malaria by mosquitoes Gregory said that although it is difficult to say that the vaccine is perfect at present, experimental results show that the protein produced by algae has successfully produced antibodies and prevented the spread of malaria At present, there is no more economic and effective method to produce anti malaria vaccine Researchers have patented the discovery, and next they will determine whether the vaccine works in humans and whether it can produce antibodies by direct consumption.