Assessment of transgenic plants expressing malaria antigens as a means of inducing protective immunity [ 2004 - 2004 ]

Research Grant

Researchers: Prof Ross Coppel (Principal investigator) ,  Dr Lina Wang ,  Prof Steven Wesselingh

Brief description Malaria infection of humans is one of the most important and deadly infectious diseases in the world, killing more than two million people each year. Traditionally, drugs and insecticides have been used to treat the disease and control its spread. Unfortunately, both of these have become much less effective and there now exist untreatable cases of malaria. Alternative control measures are urgently needed and this project focusses on the development of such an alternative, a vaccine against malaria using plants transgenic for genes encoding vaccine molecules. Growing these plants not only provides a potentially inexpensive vaccine production system but also offers a potential delivery system such that immunisation may be possible simply through consumption of an edible vaccine. This project intends to investigate the possibility of using transgenic plants expressing malaria antigens to induce protective immunity against malaria infection. The results of this project will provide vitally important information in malaria vaccine production and delivery.

Funding Amount $AUD 112,000.00

Funding Scheme NHMRC Project Grants

Notes Standard Project Grant