A Filipino doctor in the United States has developed a “robust” vaccine against malaria. Dr. Rhoel Dinglasan, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has developed a new kind of transmission-blocking vaccine (TBV) that could prevent mosquitoes from spreading the disease. In a newscast by GMA's 24 Oras, Dinglasan, a faculty of the school's molecular microbiology and immunology department, said the vaccine prevents the development of the malaria parasite in mosquitoes and its transmission to humans. An article on the website of Time magazine said that Dinglasan has developed the antigen AnAPN1 which stimulates the creation of antibodies in humans to prevent the transmission of malaria by mosquitoes. The vaccine works, the article said, when a mosquito bites an inoculated person and picks up the antibodies, locking the disease up in the mosquito gut. “For the next two years, we are going to be developing the pre-clinical aspects of this vaccine to determine whether or not we could actually make enough vaccines for clinical trials,” Dinglasan said in the newscast. He added that it may take five to ten years for the vaccine to be fully developed and distributed. Previous TBVs developed against malaria have proven unsuccessful, with some causing side effects like skin disorders when tested on humans. The AnAPN1 vaccine, according to Time, has only been tested in human blood in the laboratory and has yet to be determined if it causes any negative reactions in people.
