Pinoy professor in US develops anti-malaria vaccine

Pinoy professor in US develops anti-malaria vaccine, Dr. Rhoel Dinglasan, a pinoy professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has developed a new kind of transmission-blocking vaccine (TBV), which works by preventing mosquitoes from spreading the disease. A Filipino professor in the US has developed a “robust" vaccine against malaria.

The Pinoy faculty of the school’s molecular microbiology and immunology department, explained that the vaccine prevents the development of the malaria parasite in mosquitoes, thereby also preventing its transmission to humans. Dinglasan has developed the antigen AnAPN1 which stimulates the creation of antibodies in humans to prevent the transmission of malaria by mosquitoes.

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. 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. It has only been tested in human blood in the laboratory and it has yet to be determined if it causes any negative reactions in people