Knocking out malaria

Developing subunit vaccines against Plasmodium falciparum is challenging because the malaria parasite expresses a variety of antigenic proteins over the course of its complex lifecycle. Work by a group at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and New York University School of Medicine now suggests a strategy that could take antigen choice out of the equation by using attenuated P. falciparum strains as the basis for whole-organism vaccines.¹

A key challenge is to prove that the strategy generates strains sufficiently attenuated to be safe in humans...