A New Cure for an Old Disease.
A FILIPINO-American entomologist and biologist from John Hopkins University may have discovered a new vaccine in the fight against Malaria, the deadly disease that claims more than 1 million lives a year.
Rhoel Dinglasan, an Assistant Professor in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology Department of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, found a way of preventing the malaria parasite from developing inside mosquitoes (which carry the noxious disease.)
In a feature in the January edition of Time Magazine, Dinglasan explains that unlike traditional vaccines that kill or weaken the malaria parasite in an infected person (the immune system subsequently creates antibodies to combat the disease), his method would attack the mosquito and prevent it from spreading the disease.
According to Time Magazine, "Dinglasan has found an antigen, called AnAPN1, that causes humans to create antibodies that prevent transmission of malaria by mosquitoes. wrote Time. Get enough of these antibodies into mosquitoes, and you lock the disease up there and prevent it from infecting us."
"Sounds good, but how do you implement such a strategy? You can hardly vaccinate the mosquitoes themselves. Instead, you put the AnAPN1 into their food source: us. A mosquito that bites an inoculated person would pick up the antibodies and then be sidelined from the malaria-transmission game."
In short, Dinglasan’s method is to block the transmission of malaria by stopping the development of the malaria parasite in mosquitoes. The mosquitoes would then be prevented from spreading it to humans.
"Transmission of the malaria parasite occurs when a mosquito bites an infected human individual and the parasite develops in the mosquito," said Dinglasan in the Africa Good News website.
"And then, when it is fully developed and sits in the salivary glands of a mosquito, that mosquito then transmits the parasite to a naive uninfected human host. Transmission-blocking vaccines prevent that from happening."
Although still in its clinical stages, Dinglasan’s method is a valuable discovery in the fight against Malaria.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Malaria affects 300 to 500 million people worldwide. More than one million die from the disease, most of them young children under the age of 5, according to the CDC.
In the Philippines, Malaria is the eighth leading cause of death.
Dinglasan said the vaccine is still in its early stages and that it may take up to five to ten years before it can be mass distributed.
Born in Manila, Philippines, Dinglasan was raised in Hong Kong. He earned a Bachelors degree in 1994 from the University of Virginia where he then served as a senior laboratory technician at the Beirne Carter Center for Immunology at UVA Health Science Center.
Dinglasan then received a Masters degree in Public Health in 1998 and a Masters degree in Philosophy/Science from Yale University. He started his PhD work at Yale before transferring to the University of Maryland. He is now an Assistant Professor at John Hopkins.
Dinglasan won first prize at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School’s Annual Poster Competition for Postdoctoral Fellows in 2006 when he submitted a poster illustrating his strategy for blocking the Malaria parasite’s entry into the mosquito midgut.
( Published April 5, 2010 in Asian Journal Los Angeles p. A10 )
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