Malaria vaccine candidate ‘could be grown at home’

A potential malaria vaccine produced by genetically-engineered algae could allow people to grow their own vaccine at homes, and would be especially useful in rural parts of the developing world, say its developers. The vaccine works by blocking the reproduction of the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, which causes malaria when transmitted to humans by mosquito bites. There is still no effective vaccine against the disease, although several are in development. But some of these vaccine candidates are complex proteins and difficult and expensive to produce in bacterial or mammalian cell cultures. Now a team of US scientists have reported in PLoS ONE this month (16 May) that vaccine candidates could be produced cheaply in algal cells, and that they could halt transmission of malaria from mosquitoes to humans. Stephen Mayfield, of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology at the University of California, engineered an edible green microalgae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to produce the protein Pfs25, normally...