Scientific Articles

Despite promising progress in malaria vaccine development in recent years, an efficacious subunit vaccine against Plasmodium falciparum remains to be licensed and deployed. Cell-mediated protection from liver-stage malaria relies on a sufficient number of antigen-specific T cells reaching the liver during the time that parasites are present. A single vaccine expressing two antigens could potentially increase both the size and breadth of the antigen-specific response while halving vaccine production costs.

With the fight against malaria reportedly stalling there is an urgent demand for alternative and sustainable control measures. As the sterile insect technique (SIT) edges closer to becoming a viable complementary tool in mosquito control, it will be necessary to find standardized techniques of assessing male quality throughout the production system and post-irradiation handling. Flight ability is known to be a direct marker of insect quality. A new version of the reference International Atomic Energy Agency/Food and Agricultural Organization (IAEA/FAO) flight test device (FTD), modified to measure the flight ability and in turn quality of male Anopheles arabiensis within a 2-h period via a series of verification experiments is presented.

The humoral immune response against Anopheles salivary glands proteins in the vertebrate host can reflect the intensity of exposure to Anopheles bites and the risk of Plasmodium infection. In Colombia, the identification of exposure biomarkers is necessary due to the several Anopheles species circulating. The purpose of this study was to evaluate risk of malaria infection by measuring antibody responses against salivary glands extracts from Anopheles (Nyssorhynchus) albimanus and Anopheles (Nys.) darlingi and also against the gSG6-P1 peptide of Anopheles gambiae in people residing in a malaria endemic area in the Colombian Pacific coast.