Vaccine May Protect Against Mosquito-borne Disease.(Brief Article)

2002 JAN 16 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- A vaccine made from the milk of genetically engineered mice has been shown to prevent monkeys from developing malaria.

The same vaccine produced in goat's milk could protect millions from malaria, a major killer of African children, scientists say.

Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that the study was a laboratory experiment to prove that a vaccine against malaria could be made cheaply by changing the genes of milk producing animals.

Obtaining malaria vaccine from milk could be a key step in controlling malaria in the poorer countries where the mosquito-borne infection hits the hardest, said Anthony Stowers, a NIAID malaria researcher and the first author of the study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

"A herd of several goats could conceivably produce enough vaccine for all of Africa,'' Stowers said.

Dr. Philip J. Rosenthal, a malaria expert at the University of California, San Francisco, said the NIAID study is "an important advance'' toward a cheap malaria vaccine, but the study still leaves many unanswered questions about the vaccine itself.

"What makes this study important is not the vaccine part, but the fact they have produced this antigen (a protein that can be used as a vaccine) in milk,'' said Rosenthal. "That is very impressive.''