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. 2022 Mar 3;185(5):750-754.
doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.01.028.

The RTS,S vaccine-a chance to regain the upper hand against malaria?

Photini Sinnis  1 , David A Fidock  2
Affiliations

The RTS,S vaccine-a chance to regain the upper hand against malaria?

Photini Sinnis et al. Cell. .

Abstract

Malaria is estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO) to have killed 627,000 individuals worldwide in 2020, with nearly 80% of deaths in African children younger than five. The recent WHO approval of the RTS,S/AS01 vaccine, which targets Plasmodium falciparum pre-erythrocytic stages, provides hope that its use combined with other interventions can help reverse the current malaria resurgence.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of interests The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. The malaria parasite life cycle and the RTS,S vaccine
(A) Infection begins with mosquito-delivered sporozoites that infect the liver and then initiate the disease-causing asexual blood stages. Intra-erythrocytic parasites can also transform into gametocytes that as stage V sexual forms are infectious for Anopheles mosquitoes. Gamete formation and fusion in the mosquito midgut leads to the production of sporozoites that, once in salivary glands, are ready to infect the mammalian host. (B) Primary structures of circumsporozoite protein (CSP) and RTS,S. CSP: RI, Region I; RII, Region II; TSR, thrombospondin repeat domain; Gray boxes indicate signal and glycosylphosphatidyl-inositol anchor addition sequences; blue boxes show known T cell epitopes. RTS,S: CSP portion fused to one hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) molecule (red), combined with additional HBsAgs (gray) to form the final immunogen.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.. Timeline to developing the RTS,S malaria vaccine
EMA, European Medicines Agency. Adapted from (Kochhar et al., 2022).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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