| Grant number: | 14/23083-1 |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate |
| Effective date (Start): | July 01, 2015 |
| Effective date (End): | June 30, 2019 |
| Field of knowledge: | Biological Sciences - Parasitology - Protozoology of Parasites |
| Principal Investigator: | Daniel Youssef Bargieri |
| Grantee: | Irina Dobrescu |
| Host Institution: | Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas (ICB). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil |
| Associated research grant: | 13/13119-6 - Cell biology and molecular genetics of hemoparasites, AP.JP |
Abstract Malaria is a preventable, diagnosable and treatable disease. Yet, the disease causes thousands of deaths every year, and millions of people are still endangered. Almost all malaria cases worldwide are due to infection with Plasmodium vivax or P. falciparum. There is an urgent need to eliminate malaria, since drug resistance is reappearing, and there seems to be a general agreement that elimination is not simply a matter of intensifying the use of available tools. New strategies, like efficient vaccines, will be required.Developing a malaria vaccine is one of the greatest challenges in biomedical sciences. Vaccine development against P. vivax is even more challenging, because the parasite cannot be continuously cultured in laboratories. The lack of cultures has been an obstacle slowing pre-clinical tests of vaccine formulations against P. vivax based on known antigens, and also makes new antigen discovery particularly difficult.This project has two major proposals: i) use a malaria murine model, P. berghei, to construct hybrid transgenic parasites expressing a P. vivax blood stage antigen, MSP1(19), and use the hybrid P. berghei to challenge mice vaccinated with available PvMSP1 based vaccines, testing the efficacy of these formulations; ii) use P. berghei to search for Plasmodium functional homologs of the P. falciparum-specific invasion molecule PfRh5, a promising vaccine antigen candidate that has recently been shown to bind CD147 on the surface of host cells and to be essential for invasion.The aim of these proposals is to move forward with P. vivax vaccine development by generating a platform to test available formulations, for which tests of efficacy are lacking, and by searching for a putative new Plasmodium invasion pathway, that should guide the search for new P. vivax invasion pathways to serve as vaccine targets. | |
| News published in Agência FAPESP Newsletter about the scholarship: | |
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