DEVELOPMENT OF MALARIA MULTIPLE ANTIGEN PEPTIDE(MAP) VACCINE

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Malaria infection causes ~ 3 million deaths in endemic areas and over two billion people world-wide per year are at risk of getting the disease. The causative agent of the disease is the parasite of genus Plasmodium. With emergence of drug resistance to this parasite, there is a need for developing malaria vaccine. Several approaches are being used by others to develope a safe and efficacious vaccine. We have choosen to develope a mutiple antigen peptide (MAPs)vaccine because it circumvents several limmitations which one encounters while using attenuated live parasites,heat killed parasites or recombinat antigens. For example,presence of adventitious agents, and difficulty of generating enough parasites is often associated with live or heat killed parasites. Simlarly, production of recombinant antigens requires labor intensive process of purification and characterization. We have sucessfully synthesized three different MAPs containing epitopes from different antigens expressed during life cycle of malaria parasite. These include T- and B-cell epitopes from liver stage specific protein (LSA-1), blood stage merozoite surface antigen (MSP-1), and sporozoite specific circumsporozoite protein (CSP). It is for the first time that MAPs of this nature have been synthesized which are fully characterizable. Currently, these MAPs are being evaluated immunologically in two different strains of mice. Studies are also underway to characterize the type of immunological response.