Vaccination against liver-stage Plasmodium for malaria prevention

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  Project Leader
  Professor William (Bill) Heath

  wrheath@unimelb.edu.au

  View researcher's webpage

  +61 3 8344 5682

Project Details

Malaria is a deadly disease that causes more than 600,000 deaths each year, the majority in children. Currently there is no effective vaccine for malaria, though several are in development. For many years, long-lived memory cells have been categorized into two major subsets: central memory T cells (T_CM) and effector memory T cells (T_EM), but an additional subset, tissue-resident memory (T_RM), has recently been added to this arsenal. This latter population appears to provide the first and best line of defense against infections in peripheral tissues such as the skin. We have evidence for a resident population of CD8 T cells in the liver and are now examining their potential in protection against malaria sporozoite infection. Our project aims to develop an efficient vaccination strategy to maximize the yield of T_RM in the liver. We aim to identify the factors that contribute to the development and persistence of liver T_RM to enable development of a next-generation malaria vaccine.

Researchers

Daniel Fernandez Ruiz
Wei YI Ng
Lauren Holz