Malaria

Malaria is one of the most significant global pathogens.  Disease affects approximately 300M people and between 1 and 1.5 million die each year.  Although several vaccines are in development, the design of an effective vaccine is complicated by the multiple life forms of the parasite during replication and its high degree of antigenic variation.  In a partnership with NIH and the scientists at Walter Reed Army Institute of Medical Research, BMI applied its Immune Dampening and Refocusing technology to design a series of  broadly protective vaccine candidates against plasmodium falciperans.  Amino acid residues responsible for inducing a decoy immune response in the MSP42 protein were immune dampened in an effort to permit the immune system to generate responses to proteolytic cleavage sites that are indispensable for parasite replication.