Vaccines for malaria - prospects and promise.

摘要

Malaria has remained a major global health problem and despite serious efforts for many years, a successful malaria vaccine has remained elusive. Main reasons among many are highly complex life cycle of the parasite, extensive polymorphism of key malaria proteins and lack of correlates for malaria immunity, and unavailability of a suitable animal model. However, these hurdles notwithstanding, many experimental malaria vaccines have been developed for carrying out clinical trials. Some of these trials have already shown promising results and there is a hope, more than ever before, that at least a partially effective malaria vaccine may be available in the foreseeable future. Experimental pre-erythrocytic and erythrocytic stage vaccines have been developed beyond the laboratory research stage. Pre-clinical and efficacy studies in a few cases have given a new hope for the development of at least a partially protective vaccine.