Breakthroughs towards a malaria vaccine

ABSTRACT

Since the 1960s, the scientist Ruth Nussenzweig, C.V. Starr Professor atNew York University School of Medicine, has been working to developan antimalarial vaccine. In her testimony, she traces some of the stagesthrough which her research has passed. At the beginning of herstudies, most scientists held that it would be impossible to developsuch a vaccine. However, a different opinion had been expressed in apaper on avian malaria written some forty years earlier by a Britishresearcher and his collaborators from India. The immunizationprinciple developed by this group was irradiation of sporozoites inorder to deactivate the parasite that causes malaria. Ruth Nussenzweigrevived and expanded upon this line of research, which nowunderpins her efforts to devise an antimalarial vaccine for human use