Scientists milk animals for malar...( In their quest to mass-produce an effec...)

In their quest to mass-produce an effective malaria vaccine, scientists might one day replace expensive manufacturing facilities with a goat. In a study reported December 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online, researchers developed mice that could secrete an experimental malaria vaccine into their milk. When the purified candidate vaccine was injected into monkeys, it protected four out of five animals from a lethal dose of the malaria parasite. If the process can be scaled up to larger animals such as goats -- and early experiments indicate it can -- livestock might prove to be inexpensive, high-yield malaria vaccine factories.

A vaccine must not only be effective, it must be cheap to manufacture if it is to be used in those countries hit hardest by malaria, says lead author Anthony Stowers, Ph.D., a malaria researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Using transgenic animals to achieve both ends is an exciting possibility. If it works, a herd of several goats could conceivably produce enough vaccine for all of Africa.

Transgenic animals are so named because they contain a gene, called a transgene, from another individual or organism. For years transgenic animals, particularly mice, have been used to help scientists understand how genes work and interact with one another. More recently, researchers have introduced genes encoding specific proteins into animals to produce large quantities of those proteins for medical use. Dr. Stowers and his colleagues investigated whether transgenic animals could produce proteins for use in malaria vaccines.

Dr. Stowers and Louis Miller, M.D., chief of NIAIDs Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases and the director of its Malaria Vaccine Development Unit, joined other investigators from NIAID and Genzyme Transgenics Corporation, Framingham, Mass., to produce two transgenic mouse strains. Each strain carried a form of the gene for a surface pro
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Contact: Sam Perdue
sp189u@nih.gov
301-402-1663
NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
17-Dec-2001

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