The case for a rational genome-based vaccine against malaria

Carla Proietti, Denise L Doolan

Historically, vaccines have been designed to mimic the immunity induced by natural exposure to the target pathogen, but this approach has not been effective for any parasitic pathogen of humans or complex pathogens that cause chronic disease in humans, such as Plasmodium. Despite intense efforts by many laboratories around the world on different aspects of Plasmodium spp. molecular and cell biology, epidemiology and immunology, progress towards the goal of an effective malaria vaccine has been disappointing. The premise of rational vaccine design is to induce the desired immune response against the key pathogen antigens or epitopes targeted by protective immune responses. We advocate that development of an optimally efficacious malaria vaccine will need to improve on nature, and that this can be accomplished by rational vaccine design facilitated by mining genomic, proteomic and transcriptomic datasets in the context of relevant biological function. In our opinion, modern genome-based rational vaccine design offers enormous potential above and beyond that of whole-organism vaccines approaches established over 200 years ago where immunity is likely suboptimal due to the many genetic and immunological host-parasite adaptations evolved to allow the Plasmodium parasite to coexist in the human host, and which are associated with logistic and regulatory hurdles for production and delivery.