PfSPZ Malaria Vaccine

Malaria is a disease caused by parasites. As we know that parasites have 3 life cycles while it?s on the human host: pre-erythrocytes phase, blood-stage phase, and transmission-blocking phase. As for now, the medicine for malaria disease is artemisin combination therapy which is going to be resistant, so people try to develop a vaccine for malaria to meet the goal of malaria eradication. One of the vaccines developed is RTS,S/AS01. RTS,S/AS01 is pre-erythrocytic vaccine that confers efficacy against controlled human malaria infection in about 22% in healthy malaria 5 months after vaccination. In clinical trial phase 3, RTS,S/AS01 was 26% in young infants and 36% in children (Ishizuka et al., 2016). Eradication of malaria needs vaccine protection of more than 80% and has protective efficacy for more than 6 months. Therefore, the development of a malaria vaccine is still needed. Another malaria vaccine is PfSPZ. PfSPZ is pre-erythrocytic stage vaccine similar to RTS,S/AS01. It is whole attenuated sporozoite Plasmodium falciparum.