10 ms·

Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner

100 points by Metacelsus 3y ago

bobse 3y ago
[flagged]
pierat 3y ago
When Malaria stopped infecting and killing the people in poor countries, and on to places like Europe and USA, gee golly whillikers... I wonder why it's now being invested and being treated? Its all about the money. And most questions of this type is the same response as well.
- hfsh 3y ago
  Malaria used to be quite common in Europe and the USA...
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Various forms of malaria have been already described in the works of Hippocrates, more than 2400 years ago, and from them it appears to have been one of the most frequent infectious diseases in ancient Greece, certainly the most frequent among those that could have serious consequences, including death. While the role played by mosquitos was not known, one of the ancient theories about the cause of such infectious diseases (which was described by Varro) was not essentially different from modern theories. It supposed that the wind brings from the swamps a large number of small animals, which are so small that they cannot be seen, and which enter the human body causing the disease. Therefore the proximity of swamps should be avoided, to avoid the diseases.
- nitwit005 3y ago
  You are essentially noting your own idea doesn't make sense. You can't identify any profit motive changing, because the motive wasn't profit. No one got rich off from malaria vaccine development. As the article mentions, the funding was the Gates foundation. A charity gave away money to make it happen.
ksd482 3y ago
I was reading about the terms "vaccine" and "vaccination" and learned what a vaccine really is. I used to think of injections and syringes when I would hear of vaccination. According to wikipedia, A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease. [1] Does that mean a vaccine can also be administered in forms other than an injection such as an oral tablet? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine
- sho_hn 3y ago
  Yes. A very prominent example is the Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV). Oral, nasal, transdermal are all common delivery routes.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Or Typhoid.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    Right because I'm an old man (although if I was a young person in a poor country with endemic Polio this could still be my story today) I actually went to school one day and they fed me a sugar lump with a dot of green syrup on it. The syrup is Oral Polio Vaccine, you are eating the literal working Polio virus, but the makers have deliberately grown it somewhere very cold, so it's adapted to run much too slowly so as to not die. In your body it's too slow and when it tries to escape from the digestive system into your body a normal healthy human immune systems says - "Hey, you're not food, you're a virus. Die die die" and your body learns specifically to kill Polio as a result, successful immunisation before the virus can grow and spread. In a rich country like mine (or statistically, yours) today, the vaccine given to school kids is an injection and doesn't have a working virus in it. As a result, when things go wrong (and very rarely they do go wrong) it can't cause Polio. But, there are two costs. One, literally this is an expensive product. Poor countries can't afford to dose their kids with the expensive harder to store and use injection. Two though, maybe even more important. It doesn't work so well. If you live in a country with no Polio, "not as well" is good enough. But in countries with endemic Polio, you want the best option and that's arguably OPV at least for now.
MagaMuffin 3y ago
[dead]
rcme 3y ago
I don’t think this is necessarily a question of money. The U.S. eradicated malaria within the last 75 years and it seems like it was a pretty massive undertaking. If people at the time could developed a vaccine, I’m sure they would have.
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  Without a robust public health infrastructure, I'm guessing any effort to eliminate malaria from sub-Saharan Africa will fail badly. In the southern USA for example, the mosquitos that carry malaria are fairly common, but malaria outbreaks haven't happened since 1950 - malarial cases in the USA are typically international traveller-borne and health care providers are required by law to immediately report all malaria cases to the CDC - where the return of endemic malaria to the USA is a constant concern: https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/activities.html https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/activities.html Incidentally this vaccine doesn't look very effective in terms of preventing malarial cases in the vast majority of susceptible people. Though it may reduce childhood mortality, alone it won't do much if anything to eliminate the disease. > " The vaccine reduced the risk of clinical malaria by 56 percent in children aged 5 to 17 months and by 31 percent in those aged 6 to 12 weeks - although as in previous trials, this protection declined after a year."
- Arubis 3y ago
  If we had to do it again, we'd do it differently—not least because the way we did it the first time was by fogging entire neighborhoods with truckloads of DDT.
dillydogg 3y ago
I worked in a lab studying malaria vaccinology. There a bunch of difficulties with trying to develop a vaccine that I think are well covered here. I also learned some about the history of malaria research. 1. It is a pain in the ass to study malaria. You need to have an insectary to grow mosquitoes (through their muktiple life stages, of course) and have them feed on infected mice just to passage the parasite. This isn't like viruses where you just throw then into vero cells or bacteria that will grow in LB overnight. Parasites require dedication. This kind of operation costs a university hundreds of thousands of dollars to get up and running, and there are not too many places in the US that have robust malaria research because of it. UW and the Boston area are two that I know with good malaria research centers. 2. The lifecycle of malaria is very difficult to make a vaccine against. This is described in the article. Essentially, you go from mosquito -> skin parasite (few hr) -> liver parasite (7d also no symptoms) -> blood parasite -> mosquito. Also, the prevailing idea is that the amplification during the liver stage through red blood cell stage is so great that once the blood stage is established, it's game over. You are going to get sick as a dog. So you have a few options: target the sporozoite in the skin and blood within a couple hours, or target the liver stage where the parasite is essentially dormant and is nearly impossible to find. (My research was finding antigens in the liver stage, there are very few and they don't produce very good immune responses with standard vaccination techniques). You have to remember that for the immune system to work, you need to see the signs of the pathogen, then give yourself 5 days at the absolute minimum to expand your T cells to eradicate the pathogen. And oftentimes we're talking less than 10 infected cells in the entire liver, which is a huge organ with famously tortuous circulation. So good luck on the liver stage. All this ignoring the fact thatthe mouse model of malaria goes through the liver stage in just 4 days, which doesn't allow expansion of T cells for killing the bug. So even if we found the perfect antigen to vaccinate against, we don't have good models in mice to actually evaluate how effective a vaccine would be because of the differing biology of the model. There are some people who reconstitute human livers in mice so they can use the 7 day parasite, but those mice are pretty messed up and very expensive. And handling mosquitoes that carry human malaria is much more annoying than the mouse malaria. Still a very interesting and compelling model for research. 3. Interest in protein based vaccinations. There was a study long ago that used irradiated parasites that protected people from subsequent infections. The problem is that it took a LOT of parasites, and 5 doses of the vaccine. This strategy is similar to the inactivated virus kind of vaccinations that we all likely have received. But these parasites needed to be injected IV, 5 doses, and the parasites need to be kept at -80C until injection time. That might work for a vaccine delivered in a metropolitan area, but good luck finding -80 freezers in an African village. Around this time, researchers got interested in protein based vaccines, like the pertussis vaccine. So people went looking for a protein that was highly immunogenic, and they landed on CSP, which the article describes nicely. However, this again is mostly expressed on the skin parasite so you have just hours to recognize that protein and kill the parasite. Much less than the ideal 5-7 days. 4. Financial incentives are of course a problem. Though many would argue that financial incentives are bad for vaccine development in general because they prevent any disease from occuring, so you are eliminating your market if they work well. So where does this leave us? If we keep thinking of vaccines as we typically do, we are going to just create marginally better versions of RTS,S, which isn't great. In my opinion, the most likely way to vaccinate against malaria is transmission blocking vaccines, which would eliminate only the blood stage parasites that need to be picked up by a feeding mosquito to allow replication in the mosquito foregut. But this kind of vaccine wouldn't prevent the individual from getting sick. It would take a replication cycle of a fully vaccinated population to take it out, which is a very unappealing proposition.
epistasis 3y ago
> This isnʼt the typical narrative we hear about new discoveries and technologies. We tend to think of them emerging as soon as they’re technically possible. I don't know where this narrative comes from, but it can't really come from anybody who specializes in making brand new technologies. There are soooooo many amazing technologies that have never been brought to market because of the roadblocks like this vaccine encountered. It's even amazing that mRNA vaccines actually made it to the market, and if it hadn't been for the pandemic, there's a good chance that it would be another 15 years before they do, and this mRNA vaccination tech has been brewing since the 90s, I think? Years before the pandemic, I knew of Moderna and BioNTech because they had the capability to make customized therapeutic vaccines to train a person's immune system to fight their particular cancer's unique neoantigens. The hurdles seemed somewhat enormous even then for them. Without the kick start of money and trials that the pandemic provided, it would have taken so many more years to do the discovery needed. The problem is that we have a massive unexplored terrain in R&D and trivial amounts of funds compared to the area we can explore. We have to be extremely picky about what gets money to move forward. This is a social problem, as much as a finance problem, we simply use dollars to express our societal wishes of what we want to encourage. In the mean time, it would be good if the media would stop spreading the idea that if you build a better mouse trap, the word will bear a path to your door. It's quite the opposite.
- htss2013 3y ago
  >It's even amazing that mRNA vaccines actually made it to the market, and if it hadn't been for the pandemic, there's a good chance that it would be another 15 years before they do, and this mRNA vaccination tech has been brewing since the 90s, I think? Have they made it to market? It's been like 4 years and there are no other ones to be found outside of trials. This is kind of strange because we were told this is so much easier, safer and faster than other technologies. If the US wasn't accepting for whatever weird reason, then you'd think they'd pop up in lots of other countries. But doesn't seem like that is happening.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    This is the pace of typical development these days, outside of pandemic rushes. And four years ago was pre-pandemic, it's only been a couple years of pushing on other targets. mRNA vaccine tech is one of the biggest advances in biotech in a long time, the other apparatus has not necessarily caught up.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
I think we would be better off wiping out the disease carrying species of mosquitoes. Not only would you get rid of malaria, you would also get rid of a lot of other mosquito borne diseases.
- andirk 3y ago
  There are attempts to do exactly this where certain types of mosquitos are given something that makes them impotent after some number of generations. It can create other issues, though, in regards to the disruption of that part of the food chain. This is from memory from a few years ago and I don't have a source on hand.
yorwba 3y ago
> The sporozoite preparation came directly from the salivary glands of mosquitoes, which had been dissected, ground up, and irradiated. But how to purify this preparation remained an open question. It mattered because waste material from mosquitoes’ salivary glands could be dangerous, causing embolisms or severe reactions if injected. I'm amazed that dissecting mosquitoes to extract malaria parasites for use in a vaccine actually produced enough material to test it on animals, and even more amazed that they've kept working on this approach since 1967. The article links to https://www.wired.com/story/tiny-guillotine-decapitates-mosquitoes-to-fight-malaria/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiny-guillotine-decapitates-mosq... which mentions that they had people dissecting 300 mosquitoes an hour before introducing some automation to handle 30 simultaneously. (It doesn't mention though how they deal with the dangerous waste material problem.)
objektif 3y ago
I really feel sad every time I read about mosquito born diseases. It is very hard for a person in the US to understand how terrible of a problem this is 600000 people each year!!! I really hope to see the day when we eradicate all disease carrying mosquitos.
- mcmoor 3y ago
  One of species we should have eradicated. Whatever their niche is, it doesn't seem like unique anyway. Ironically we may not have that much power over nature as we think we have.
x0x0 3y ago
Wild. From the article: > Malaria had become a common treatment for syphilis between the 1920s and 1940s. This was because the Austrian scientist Julius Wagner-Jauregg had discovered ‘fever therapy’: that patients could be cleared of advanced syphilis if they experienced persistently high fevers, such as those caused by malaria. We used malaria to treat syphilis.
- bink 3y ago
  And mercury as well.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  We used to use mercury compounds to treat syphilis. Sometimes effectively, because mercury is a pretty good anti microbial and early stages of an infection start with skin sores that could be treated with topical applications. Once the infection got to later stages, though you'd need enough to cause mercury poisoning.
Arubis 3y ago
Much shorter version: - vaccines are typically developed against viruses and bacteria; malaria is caused by a parasite. vaccination against parasites is harder. - TFA posits that, since the worst malaria strains mostly affect impoverished areas, there's less profit motive. I suspect this is true, but would love to see proof.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  impoverished areas ^without an insurance system to scam
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- stephenhuey 3y ago
  It's not just a parasite - it's a protist. An online search led me to a snippet from a paywalled online study site that has this text: "Biologically, a protist-disease vaccine is more difficult to develop due to the mechanism and pathophysiology of diseases such as malaria and chagas." More on vaccines for protozoal diseases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3961066/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3961066/ Specifics on the difficulty with a vaccine for malaria: https://www.malariavaccine.org/malaria-and-vaccines/vaccine-development/life-cycle-malaria-parasite https://www.malariavaccine.org/malaria-and-vaccines/vaccine-...
hackandthink 3y ago
https://ourworldindata.org/malaria https://ourworldindata.org/malaria would not have thought that malaria was prevalent in Sweden and Finland "However, up until the early twentieth century, malaria also plagued the population in regions with a temperate climate. It was even endemic up to sub-Arctic regions in e.g. Finland and European Russia." https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12936-021-03744-9 https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1...
fooker 3y ago
Unless I'm missing something, this article claims without evidence that the primary reason is malaria affecting poorer regions of the world. It's surprising that there's no mention of quick mutation of the virus, people have been trying to make vaccines for a few centuries now. Coincidentally, this is also the reason we went from COVID vaccines "eradicating COVID" to just "slowing the spread". Science is hard, even without social issues potentially being a compounding factor.
- croes 3y ago
  But it's still a valid complain. Look how fast HIV switched from death sentence to you-can-live-with-it
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    We can't cure it, but you can live with it by paying thousands of dollars to big pharma indefinitely. Hmm.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - croes 3y ago
      That proves the point.
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      Good news for the weekend, HIV has probably been cured. Edit: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/5th-person-likely-cured-hiv-another-long-term-remission-rcna40116 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/5th-person-likely...
    - JacobThreeThree 3y ago
      Curing patients is not a sustainable business model. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...

100 points by Metacelsus 3y ago

[flagged]

When Malaria stopped infecting and killing the people in poor countries, and on to places like Europe and USA, gee golly whillikers... I wonder why it's now being invested and being treated? Its all about the money. And most questions of this type is the same response as well.

hfsh 3y ago
Malaria used to be quite common in Europe and the USA...
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Various forms of malaria have been already described in the works of Hippocrates, more than 2400 years ago, and from them it appears to have been one of the most frequent infectious diseases in ancient Greece, certainly the most frequent among those that could have serious consequences, including death. While the role played by mosquitos was not known, one of the ancient theories about the cause of such infectious diseases (which was described by Varro) was not essentially different from modern theories. It supposed that the wind brings from the swamps a large number of small animals, which are so small that they cannot be seen, and which enter the human body causing the disease. Therefore the proximity of swamps should be avoided, to avoid the diseases.
nitwit005 3y ago
You are essentially noting your own idea doesn't make sense. You can't identify any profit motive changing, because the motive wasn't profit. No one got rich off from malaria vaccine development. As the article mentions, the funding was the Gates foundation. A charity gave away money to make it happen.

ksd482 3y ago

I was reading about the terms "vaccine" and "vaccination" and learned what a vaccine really is. I used to think of injections and syringes when I would hear of vaccination. According to wikipedia, A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease. [1] Does that mean a vaccine can also be administered in forms other than an injection such as an oral tablet? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine

sho_hn 3y ago
Yes. A very prominent example is the Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV). Oral, nasal, transdermal are all common delivery routes.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Or Typhoid.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  Right because I'm an old man (although if I was a young person in a poor country with endemic Polio this could still be my story today) I actually went to school one day and they fed me a sugar lump with a dot of green syrup on it. The syrup is Oral Polio Vaccine, you are eating the literal working Polio virus, but the makers have deliberately grown it somewhere very cold, so it's adapted to run much too slowly so as to not die. In your body it's too slow and when it tries to escape from the digestive system into your body a normal healthy human immune systems says - "Hey, you're not food, you're a virus. Die die die" and your body learns specifically to kill Polio as a result, successful immunisation before the virus can grow and spread. In a rich country like mine (or statistically, yours) today, the vaccine given to school kids is an injection and doesn't have a working virus in it. As a result, when things go wrong (and very rarely they do go wrong) it can't cause Polio. But, there are two costs. One, literally this is an expensive product. Poor countries can't afford to dose their kids with the expensive harder to store and use injection. Two though, maybe even more important. It doesn't work so well. If you live in a country with no Polio, "not as well" is good enough. But in countries with endemic Polio, you want the best option and that's arguably OPV at least for now.

MagaMuffin 3y ago

[dead]

rcme 3y ago

I don’t think this is necessarily a question of money. The U.S. eradicated malaria within the last 75 years and it seems like it was a pretty massive undertaking. If people at the time could developed a vaccine, I’m sure they would have.

photochemsyn 3y ago
Without a robust public health infrastructure, I'm guessing any effort to eliminate malaria from sub-Saharan Africa will fail badly. In the southern USA for example, the mosquitos that carry malaria are fairly common, but malaria outbreaks haven't happened since 1950 - malarial cases in the USA are typically international traveller-borne and health care providers are required by law to immediately report all malaria cases to the CDC - where the return of endemic malaria to the USA is a constant concern: https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/activities.html https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/activities.html Incidentally this vaccine doesn't look very effective in terms of preventing malarial cases in the vast majority of susceptible people. Though it may reduce childhood mortality, alone it won't do much if anything to eliminate the disease. > " The vaccine reduced the risk of clinical malaria by 56 percent in children aged 5 to 17 months and by 31 percent in those aged 6 to 12 weeks - although as in previous trials, this protection declined after a year."
Arubis 3y ago
If we had to do it again, we'd do it differently—not least because the way we did it the first time was by fogging entire neighborhoods with truckloads of DDT.

dillydogg 3y ago

I worked in a lab studying malaria vaccinology. There a bunch of difficulties with trying to develop a vaccine that I think are well covered here. I also learned some about the history of malaria research. 1. It is a pain in the ass to study malaria. You need to have an insectary to grow mosquitoes (through their muktiple life stages, of course) and have them feed on infected mice just to passage the parasite. This isn't like viruses where you just throw then into vero cells or bacteria that will grow in LB overnight. Parasites require dedication. This kind of operation costs a university hundreds of thousands of dollars to get up and running, and there are not too many places in the US that have robust malaria research because of it. UW and the Boston area are two that I know with good malaria research centers. 2. The lifecycle of malaria is very difficult to make a vaccine against. This is described in the article. Essentially, you go from mosquito -> skin parasite (few hr) -> liver parasite (7d also no symptoms) -> blood parasite -> mosquito. Also, the prevailing idea is that the amplification during the liver stage through red blood cell stage is so great that once the blood stage is established, it's game over. You are going to get sick as a dog. So you have a few options: target the sporozoite in the skin and blood within a couple hours, or target the liver stage where the parasite is essentially dormant and is nearly impossible to find. (My research was finding antigens in the liver stage, there are very few and they don't produce very good immune responses with standard vaccination techniques). You have to remember that for the immune system to work, you need to see the signs of the pathogen, then give yourself 5 days at the absolute minimum to expand your T cells to eradicate the pathogen. And oftentimes we're talking less than 10 infected cells in the entire liver, which is a huge organ with famously tortuous circulation. So good luck on the liver stage. All this ignoring the fact thatthe mouse model of malaria goes through the liver stage in just 4 days, which doesn't allow expansion of T cells for killing the bug. So even if we found the perfect antigen to vaccinate against, we don't have good models in mice to actually evaluate how effective a vaccine would be because of the differing biology of the model. There are some people who reconstitute human livers in mice so they can use the 7 day parasite, but those mice are pretty messed up and very expensive. And handling mosquitoes that carry human malaria is much more annoying than the mouse malaria. Still a very interesting and compelling model for research. 3. Interest in protein based vaccinations. There was a study long ago that used irradiated parasites that protected people from subsequent infections. The problem is that it took a LOT of parasites, and 5 doses of the vaccine. This strategy is similar to the inactivated virus kind of vaccinations that we all likely have received. But these parasites needed to be injected IV, 5 doses, and the parasites need to be kept at -80C until injection time. That might work for a vaccine delivered in a metropolitan area, but good luck finding -80 freezers in an African village. Around this time, researchers got interested in protein based vaccines, like the pertussis vaccine. So people went looking for a protein that was highly immunogenic, and they landed on CSP, which the article describes nicely. However, this again is mostly expressed on the skin parasite so you have just hours to recognize that protein and kill the parasite. Much less than the ideal 5-7 days. 4. Financial incentives are of course a problem. Though many would argue that financial incentives are bad for vaccine development in general because they prevent any disease from occuring, so you are eliminating your market if they work well. So where does this leave us? If we keep thinking of vaccines as we typically do, we are going to just create marginally better versions of RTS,S, which isn't great. In my opinion, the most likely way to vaccinate against malaria is transmission blocking vaccines, which would eliminate only the blood stage parasites that need to be picked up by a feeding mosquito to allow replication in the mosquito foregut. But this kind of vaccine wouldn't prevent the individual from getting sick. It would take a replication cycle of a fully vaccinated population to take it out, which is a very unappealing proposition.

epistasis 3y ago

> This isnʼt the typical narrative we hear about new discoveries and technologies. We tend to think of them emerging as soon as they’re technically possible. I don't know where this narrative comes from, but it can't really come from anybody who specializes in making brand new technologies. There are soooooo many amazing technologies that have never been brought to market because of the roadblocks like this vaccine encountered. It's even amazing that mRNA vaccines actually made it to the market, and if it hadn't been for the pandemic, there's a good chance that it would be another 15 years before they do, and this mRNA vaccination tech has been brewing since the 90s, I think? Years before the pandemic, I knew of Moderna and BioNTech because they had the capability to make customized therapeutic vaccines to train a person's immune system to fight their particular cancer's unique neoantigens. The hurdles seemed somewhat enormous even then for them. Without the kick start of money and trials that the pandemic provided, it would have taken so many more years to do the discovery needed. The problem is that we have a massive unexplored terrain in R&D and trivial amounts of funds compared to the area we can explore. We have to be extremely picky about what gets money to move forward. This is a social problem, as much as a finance problem, we simply use dollars to express our societal wishes of what we want to encourage. In the mean time, it would be good if the media would stop spreading the idea that if you build a better mouse trap, the word will bear a path to your door. It's quite the opposite.

htss2013 3y ago
>It's even amazing that mRNA vaccines actually made it to the market, and if it hadn't been for the pandemic, there's a good chance that it would be another 15 years before they do, and this mRNA vaccination tech has been brewing since the 90s, I think? Have they made it to market? It's been like 4 years and there are no other ones to be found outside of trials. This is kind of strange because we were told this is so much easier, safer and faster than other technologies. If the US wasn't accepting for whatever weird reason, then you'd think they'd pop up in lots of other countries. But doesn't seem like that is happening.
- epistasis 3y ago
  This is the pace of typical development these days, outside of pandemic rushes. And four years ago was pre-pandemic, it's only been a couple years of pushing on other targets. mRNA vaccine tech is one of the biggest advances in biotech in a long time, the other apparatus has not necessarily caught up.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

I think we would be better off wiping out the disease carrying species of mosquitoes. Not only would you get rid of malaria, you would also get rid of a lot of other mosquito borne diseases.

andirk 3y ago
There are attempts to do exactly this where certain types of mosquitos are given something that makes them impotent after some number of generations. It can create other issues, though, in regards to the disruption of that part of the food chain. This is from memory from a few years ago and I don't have a source on hand.

yorwba 3y ago

> The sporozoite preparation came directly from the salivary glands of mosquitoes, which had been dissected, ground up, and irradiated. But how to purify this preparation remained an open question. It mattered because waste material from mosquitoes’ salivary glands could be dangerous, causing embolisms or severe reactions if injected. I'm amazed that dissecting mosquitoes to extract malaria parasites for use in a vaccine actually produced enough material to test it on animals, and even more amazed that they've kept working on this approach since 1967. The article links to https://www.wired.com/story/tiny-guillotine-decapitates-mosquitoes-to-fight-malaria/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiny-guillotine-decapitates-mosq... which mentions that they had people dissecting 300 mosquitoes an hour before introducing some automation to handle 30 simultaneously. (It doesn't mention though how they deal with the dangerous waste material problem.)

objektif 3y ago

I really feel sad every time I read about mosquito born diseases. It is very hard for a person in the US to understand how terrible of a problem this is 600000 people each year!!! I really hope to see the day when we eradicate all disease carrying mosquitos.

mcmoor 3y ago
One of species we should have eradicated. Whatever their niche is, it doesn't seem like unique anyway. Ironically we may not have that much power over nature as we think we have.

x0x0 3y ago

Wild. From the article: > Malaria had become a common treatment for syphilis between the 1920s and 1940s. This was because the Austrian scientist Julius Wagner-Jauregg had discovered ‘fever therapy’: that patients could be cleared of advanced syphilis if they experienced persistently high fevers, such as those caused by malaria. We used malaria to treat syphilis.

bink 3y ago
And mercury as well.
meepmorp 3y ago
We used to use mercury compounds to treat syphilis. Sometimes effectively, because mercury is a pretty good anti microbial and early stages of an infection start with skin sores that could be treated with topical applications. Once the infection got to later stages, though you'd need enough to cause mercury poisoning.

Arubis 3y ago

Much shorter version: - vaccines are typically developed against viruses and bacteria; malaria is caused by a parasite. vaccination against parasites is harder. - TFA posits that, since the worst malaria strains mostly affect impoverished areas, there's less profit motive. I suspect this is true, but would love to see proof.

yieldcrv 3y ago
impoverished areas ^without an insurance system to scam
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
stephenhuey 3y ago
It's not just a parasite - it's a protist. An online search led me to a snippet from a paywalled online study site that has this text: "Biologically, a protist-disease vaccine is more difficult to develop due to the mechanism and pathophysiology of diseases such as malaria and chagas." More on vaccines for protozoal diseases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3961066/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3961066/ Specifics on the difficulty with a vaccine for malaria: https://www.malariavaccine.org/malaria-and-vaccines/vaccine-development/life-cycle-malaria-parasite https://www.malariavaccine.org/malaria-and-vaccines/vaccine-...

hackandthink 3y ago

https://ourworldindata.org/malaria https://ourworldindata.org/malaria would not have thought that malaria was prevalent in Sweden and Finland "However, up until the early twentieth century, malaria also plagued the population in regions with a temperate climate. It was even endemic up to sub-Arctic regions in e.g. Finland and European Russia." https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12936-021-03744-9 https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1...

fooker 3y ago

Unless I'm missing something, this article claims without evidence that the primary reason is malaria affecting poorer regions of the world. It's surprising that there's no mention of quick mutation of the virus, people have been trying to make vaccines for a few centuries now. Coincidentally, this is also the reason we went from COVID vaccines "eradicating COVID" to just "slowing the spread". Science is hard, even without social issues potentially being a compounding factor.

croes 3y ago
But it's still a valid complain. Look how fast HIV switched from death sentence to you-can-live-with-it
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  We can't cure it, but you can live with it by paying thousands of dollars to big pharma indefinitely. Hmm.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - croes 3y ago
    That proves the point.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Good news for the weekend, HIV has probably been cured. Edit: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/5th-person-likely-cured-hiv-another-long-term-remission-rcna40116 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/5th-person-likely...
  - JacobThreeThree 3y ago
    Curing patients is not a sustainable business model. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...