Sanaria, PATH Open Facility For Producing Novel Malaria Vaccine

Sanaria Inc., (Rockville, MD) and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative have officially opened a clinical manufacturing facility to produce a vaccine that uses a weakened form of the malaria parasite to fight malaria, a disease that annually kills more than one million people. The event marks a major milestone in the effort to translate Sanaria’s approach into an effective weapon against the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum.

Most malaria vaccines currently under development are subunit vaccines that consist of recombinant or genetically engineered proteins that represent a portion of the parasite believed to be capable of eliciting an immune response against the disease. Sanaria, however, is producing a live, attenuated vaccine that contains a weakened form of the entire organism.

The manufacturing facility was constructed to allow scientists to safely rear aseptically produced mosquitoes, feed them blood containing the malaria parasite, irradiate the insects to weaken the parasites, and harvest the parasites from the mosquito’s salivary glands. Sanaria seeks to use these parasites as the main component of a “whole-parasite” vaccine to be tested in a clinical trial in US adult volunteers next year.