I'll be interested to see how this compares to Malaria vaccine, R21, which was recently announced to be highly effective[0]. It seems like R21 is similarly effective and may not have the perception or scalability issues that a "live parasite" vaccine might have. That said, I'm just happy to hear that there's progress being made. Hopefully we can see the vaccine rolled out to the millions at risk ASAP.
> The vaccination protected 87.5% of participants who were infected after three months with the same strain of parasite that was used in the inoculation, and 77.8% of those who were infected with a different strain. This is a significant improvement on earlier efforts to use live parasites in a malaria vaccine, which did not perform as well against different strains.
> Another vaccine, called R21, was recently shown to be up to 77% effective in a trial of 450 young children, and a larger study is under way.
I assume we can't rally make direct comparisons between the two based on these very different studies, but both appear to be working really well.
There's also the "Yale lab develops revolutionary RNA vaccine for malaria" vaccine using "self-amplifying RNA, or saRNA" which looks interesting although it's in earlier stages testing wise. https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/03/12/yale-lab-develops-...
It has killed atleast 50 times more people than covid, but its shocking how little coverage it has received over time, mostly because its not a concern for many ‘first world’ countries.
Nice idea, but there's no way something like this would pass FDA. Even for the live VSV Ebola vaccine that contains no Ebola at all in it, except for the encoded spike, it's recommended for a doctor to do administration, and it's not commercially available, so you have to justify your need for it to the federal government. You are also supposed to avoid close contact with anyone else for quite a while after, to prevent transmission of the vaccine virus.
That's ok, though; the US hardly sees any malaria, and the cases that do present here are typically contracted in other countries. It can spread here, and we shouldn't be complacent, but the US isn't where a vaccine is needed.
No it only requires the approval of the destination country. But in the case of Ebola, some of those countries didn't have an established infrastructure to run trials so the WHO initially hesitated. But in the end they got Merck to run the trials and FDA and EMA to evaluate the results.
> The sporozoites must be harvested from mosquito salivary glands and then stored at extremely low temperatures, complicating their distribution in resource-poor areas. No vaccine has ever been mass-produced using mosquitoes before. Alonso remembers someone asking him about the possibility years ago: “It is a crazy idea,” he replied at the time.
Crazy indeed, it’s amazing the things people think up.
How do vaccines with live parasites work? Does attenuation somehow guarantee that the live parasites won't replicate to the point of becoming a full-on infection?
Can these vaccines only be used on patients with healthy immune systems, and those with weakened immune systems have the potential for cascading replication and full infections?
As per their publication, they simultaneously give you anti-malaria medication in addition to the sporozoites. Its called chemoprophylaxis vaccination. (Just learned of it today)
There are other vaccines such as the polio (the one which was swallowed) which had a similar mechanism. You could even infect others with it (which has benefits for herd immunity). But the chances of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis was extremely low 1:2.700.000 (it was not given to people with immunity defects).
Someday, perhaps the vaccine will be the major disease vector, as it is now for Polio.
This is not an anti-vax position. This is desirable, but I'm really curious how to manage the message of "The only way you'll catch this disease nowadays is from this vaccine, but you still have to get it".
It's called a challenge trial. It's done to compress later stages of clinical trials and only uses low risk volunteers. It's also generally only done when theres effective treatment for expected negative outcomes.
I’ve been the “lab rat” in many US studies, and generally all we get is a disclosure stating the purpose, risks and methods of the experiment. There’s no test for “scientific literacy” at all. I’m not even sure the point of this. What people care about is the risks and methods.
[0] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/04/23/gr... Previous HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26916237