Immunity to malaria under research

Health Watch, Normal
Source:

The National, Thursday 17th November 2011

NOT everyone responds to malaria in the same way. In fact, some people can eventually develop immunity to the parasite, showing only mild symptoms or even none at all, if they are infected.
Dr Alyssa Barry from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute’s Infection and Immunity division employed a new technique to explore the ins and outs of this malaria immunity by tracking which variations of malaria proteins an individual is immune to.
A deeper understanding of malaria immunity, and the proteins that trigger an immune response, could lead to improved malaria diagnostics and may highlight some drug targets for a malaria vaccine.
Barry used protein microarrays to track a particular protein found in malaria.
“We know that protein, PfEMP1, that is particularly important for the host immune response can be produced in many varieties, and these can be altered by the parasite to avoid detection by the immune system,” she said.
Adapting existing protein microarray technology to allow small samples of human serum to be tested simultaneously against hundreds of variants of PfEMP1 to determine to which variants the person was immune.