Researchers working on malaria vaccine

Malaria kills more than one million people every year, the majority of them small children in underdeveloped sub-Saharan African countries. But in a sprawling lab in Rockville, David O'Brochta is inching closer to a vaccine every day.

O'Brochta, a university professor working at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, has been studying malaria-carrying mosquitos for five years. He spends his days carefully dissecting the insects, trying to expose their salivary glands where malaria parasites cluster. He's trying to stop a simple cycle.

"There is a tight cycle of transmission of malaria that goes from mosquito to human to mosquito," O'Brochta said. "If that cycle doesn't exist then there is no malaria transmission. If you can break any part of the transmission cycle then you'll interrupt transmission."

UMBI and Sanaria, a Rockville-based biotechnology company, are partnering to genetically engineer mosquitos infected with the parasites so they can study their components. Their hope is to eventually create a weakened form of the infectious agent that would cause the human body to develop immunities. This immunity could help fight off a more potent malaria virus.

If all goes well, the vaccine could be on the market as early as 2013, Sanaria CEO Stephen Hoffman said.

The parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which causes most malaria cases in Africa, is responsible for more child deaths in the world than any other infectious agent, he added.

He said he has a strong sense of mission everyday he spends in the lab.

"If you're a doctor and a tropical medicine specialist and you want to make the greatest impact, then it would make sense that developing a vaccine to prevent malaria is would be the ultimate goal," he said.

But it's not easy work. Sanaria - which means "healthy air" in Italian - needs a large batch of highly infected mosquitos to study. However, the infectiousness of various mosquitos often varies.

"In order for [Sanaria] to make a vaccine, they need to grow and dissect up a lot of mosquitoes, and they need to infect a lot of large numbers of mosquitoes, and they need to dissect the mosquitoes one at a time and harvest the salivary glands," O'Brochta said. "Some of the salivary glands are loaded with these parasites, but not all of them are, and that's where we come in."

O'Brochta is using transgenic technology to turn off the genes that trigger each insect's immune response to the parasite, developing a genetically engineered mosquito that will become super-infected.

Both O'Brochta and Hoffman said such a vaccine could save millions of lives. After developing the vaccine, Sanaria's challenge will be to work with international organizations, such the World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund to get the vaccine to the children who so desperately need it.

"It's a very complicated problem. It's not only related to biology it's also related to economics and politics," said O'Brochta. "So [developing a vaccine] is a possible solution, but it's not a definitive solution unless the vaccine can be delivered."

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