Assessment of transgenic plants expressing malaria antigens as a means of inducing protective immunity

Funded Activity Summary

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.

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 01-01-2004

End Date: 01-01-2004

Funding Scheme: NHMRC Project Grants

Funding Amount: $112,000.00

Funder: National Health and Medical Research Council

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

Humoural immunology and immunochemistry

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

There are no SEO codes available for this funding activity

Other Keywords

Immunology | Malaria | Malaria vaccine | Malaria vaccines | Oral vaccine | Parasitic disease | Parasitology | Protection against malarial disease | Transgenesis

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