Grand Challenges grant to make malaria vaccines better

The Australian National University (ANU) has won a US$100,000 grant from Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant will see Associate Professor Ian Cockburn pursue an innovative global health and development research project aimed at making malaria vaccines more effective.

Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mould in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. In Associate Professor Cockburn’s case, he wants to improve the quality and quantity of the antibody response to make malaria vaccines better.

Nearly half the world’s population is at risk of malaria, with roughly 214 million malaria cases and 438,000 malaria deaths occurring in 2015. Yet Associate Professor Cockburn said the current vaccine for malaria produces antibodies that are short lived and not very protective.

“We want to find out how to turn a vaccine like that into one that really does the job,” he said. With this in mind, Associate Professor Cockburn and his team will test two approaches to improve vaccines by increasing competition for the vaccine antigen by immune cells and prolonging the survival of those immune cells.

The researchers will combine a major vaccine candidate for malaria, Plasmodium falciparum circumsporozoite protein (CSP), with both a monoclonal anti-CSP antibody (so-called passive vaccination) and an immune cell-stimulating molecule hIL-21, both individually and in combination. These will be tested in mice for promoting antibody production and a protective immune response by measuring malaria parasite levels in the liver.

“If we are successful, we can potentially use similar approaches to make other vaccines better,” said Associate Professor Cockburn.

The full list of GCE winners for 2016 can be viewed on the Grand Challenges website. The foundation will be accepting applications for the next GCE round in September.