Science Bulletin July/August 2014 | Page 18

PUBLIC HEALTH

MALARIA

SPOROBOT

Since the 1980’s Stephen Hoffman has been searching for a vaccine for malaria, a disease which killed 627,000 people in 2012 according to the World Health Organization. After failing to create a successful vaccination at Walter Reed in the 80’s, and coming down with a case of malaria, testing the failed Walter Reed vaccine, Hoffman created Sanaria in the early 2000’s to mass produce a new vaccine which has shown great promise.

In 2013 the vaccine known as PfSVZ showed a 100% protection rate in an early phase one trial. PfSVZ was Administered to six different patients who were then exposed to malaria carrying mosquitoes, none of the subjects came down with a case of malaria. The phase one clinical trial was the first time that a malaria vaccine was proven to give human beings 100% protection even on the smallest of scales.

Although PfSVZ showed amazing promise there are still several hurdles for Sanaria to overcome before the next trial and eventually mass production can begin. The vaccine relies on malaria sporozoites, immature and weaker forms of the deadly malaria parasite, but unfortunately for researchers the sporozoites can only be found in the saliva of mosquitoes which have been exposed to radiation.

As you can imagine, obtaining the vaccine is almost impossible, and thats why Sanaria has high hopes for their robot, the Sporobot. The vaccine that was used in the trial in 2013 was made by exposing mosquitoes containing the malaria parasite to radiation and then dissecting, by hand, the saliva glands of the irradiated mosquitoes. Sporobot a robot developed by the Harvard lab of Biorobotics for Sanaria aims to cut down the time dissection of the mosquitos

Roughly two months ago Sanaria launched a crowdsourcing campaign on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. Some questioned the reasons for launching the campaign, arguing if the vaccine was so promising it would easily receive all the funding it needed from the PATH initiative and other foundations. Hoffman claimed the reason for crowdfunding was the delay in approval of grants and the smaller NIH budget after the sequester, but acknowledged that Sanaria was the first major biotech company to try crowdfunding. After the campaign only raised 18% of the 250,000 dollar goal many attributed the lack of support to skepticism related to the need for crowdfunding. Nevertheless, Hoffman says Sanaria will continue to work on Sporobot with the money they did raise, and as he said in a final thank you video on the projects Indiegogo page “We (Sanaria) will succeed and continue to take this (the virus) forward”.