About
Laurent RENIA – Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN), Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR) (Singapour – République de Singapour)
The development of an effective malaria vaccine has remained elusive till today. This is in part due to our incomplete understanding of the immune mechanisms that confer and correlate with protection. It was reported earlier that inoculation of human volunteers with Plasmodium falciparum sporozoites under drug cover conferred full protection from a subsequent challenge. While it was demonstrated that cellular immunity could be involved, the role of the humoral arm of adaptive immunity in the observed protection was unknown. Here, we demonstrate that immunized sera obtained from our previous study were fully capable of blocking sporozoite invasion of hepatocytes in vitro, demonstrating that humoral immunity has a functional role in conferring protection. In addition, we developed and utilized a novel cell surface expressed P. falciparum antigen library in the characterization of the antibody repertoire present and reveal the breadth of the antibody response induced in that sporozoite inoculation study for the first time. We further identified antigens associated with protection that can be considered as future potential vaccine targets.
Site web du laboratoire : http://www.a-star.edu.sg/sign/Research/Principal-Investigators/tid/6/R-NIA-Laurent.aspx
Contact : Artur Scherf (artur.scherf@pasteur.fr – Poste 86.16)