World Malaria Day

It’s easy to be so focused on your research that you lose sight of the impact malaria has on individuals and families. However, today is an important moment to step back and take it all in. We made enormous progress in reducing malaria deaths by almost 50% between 2000 and 2015, but progress has stalled in the last 10 years. Today, we are still witnessing almost 600,000 deaths a year, mainly among children under 5 years of age. Each one of these is a tragedy.

There is some cause for optimism, with vaccines soon to be introduced at scale. These can work alongside bed nets, insecticides, and drugs to bring down rates of infection. But our optimism needs to meet realism. Today we are making important but incremental steps, and there will continue to be hundreds of thousands of deaths from malaria.

At the MAM Conference in February, we heard from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who are aiming to reduce infection rates by 80-90% in the first 3-5 years of life. This would be an incredible achievement, but even in this best-case scenario, what would happen to these children when they stop receiving the vaccines and drugs that protect them?

It’s easy to forget all of the good work that has come before your own endeavour, but history would tell us that exposure to malaria at 6 or 10 or 12 years of age does not have a happier ending. That is why we need to understand how to stop infection from causing disease. We’ll be talking about this at a virtual event next week and everyone is invited to join in the conversation.

We shouldn’t wait to see what happens when infection rates fall. We already know.

How we got here

If you want to know more about the background to the BIO-004 trial, you can check out our earlier work on the VAC063 and VAC069 studies. These clinical trials tested candidate malaria vaccines in volunteers who underwent controlled human malaria infection. On the side, we were able to use samples from these trials to study damaging immune responses to malaria and to learn which parts of the immune response had to be switched off to promote health.

This was all made easier because we were able to compare the immune response to Plasmodium falciparum (the most deadly malaria parasite) with Plasmodium vivax (which causes high fever but not severe disease). You can watch Phil explain these trials, their results and what it all means during his Keynote Lecture at the EMBL Malaria Conference (BioMalPar).

And just last month, Wiebke was presenting our very latest data on controlled human malaria infection at the MAM Conference in Australia. We’ll get you up to speed with what we said, what we heard and what we saw next month. If you’re keen to get a sneak-peak, check out our Instagram : )

Start your engines

We are in full swing recruiting participants for the BIO-004 clinical trial, which will tell us how people learn to switch off damaging immune responses to malaria parasites. We think this can tell us how children become immune to severe forms of malaria after only a handful of infections and without being able to effectively kill parasites. This could be game-changing for malaria immunology and disease control, and we couldn’t be more excited to get started after 5 years of planning.

We expect the trial to kick off in June 2024 and run for about 20 months. this will give us all of the samples we need to answer our questions (and keep us busy to retirement). To get everyone up to speed we’ve posted a video that explains the BIO-004 trial and the science behind this study. If you come back each month you’ll hear all of our trial and research-related news, as well as updates on our other big lab projects.

And if you have any questions or want to talk science, join us on our Discord. It’s a friendly place.