Third in a series on malaria immunology from graduate student Taryn McLaughlin. Sorry for the delay last week, caused by technical blog glitches.
It’s easy for me to find reasons to brag when it comes to research here at Emory. However, even an unbiased person should be excited about the malaria vaccine platform being developed by Alberto Moreno at the Emory Vaccine Center.
His vaccine is based on a chimeric protein (a protein that is a combination of bits and pieces of multiple proteins, a la the creature from Greek mythology) that should get your immune system to target multiple stages of the Plasmodium vivax life cycle. Part of it targets the infectious sporozoite, part of it targets the blood stage merozoite, and part of it will even target the transmitted gamete in future versions. This seems like a no brainer. Of course we should be targeting multiple stages!
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