‘Mop Up’ Malaria Vaccine Advances to Trials in People
University of Florida researcher Rhoel Dinglasan, Ph.D., was awarded $6 million by the Global Health Innovative Technology Fund to test a new malaria vaccine in people. The process leading to a phase 1 clinical trial begins April 2021.
Dinglasan is a professor of infectious diseases in UF’s College of Veterinary Medicine, who joined the faculty under the state’s preeminence initiative. He has worked most of his career to end malaria which disproportionately affects people living in poverty in developing countries.
“Many of the existing malaria vaccines and drugs have failed because the Plasmodium parasites have co-evolved with mosquitoes and people,” says Dinglasan, who is also a faculty member in UF’s Emerging Pathogens Institute. “They know how to dodge our immune system and live within mosquitoes, and that’s a hard game to circumvent. What we’re doing is completely different. We’re focusing on stopping the mosquitoes from transmitting the parasites to people in the first place.”
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