Name: 【TED】Faith Osier: The key to a better malaria vaccine (The key to a better malaria vaccine | Faith Osier)
Uploaded: 2018-11-06T21:14:13.000Z
Duration: 7 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

of falciparum malaria in Africa every year,

I would like to talk to you about malaria vaccines.

The ones that we have made to date are simply not good enough.

We've been working at it for 100 plus years.

We could see just a tiny fraction of what the parasite really looked like.

of just how complex the parasite really is.

our approach to vaccine design has remained pretty rudimentary.

To make a good vaccine, we must go back to basics

to understand how our bodies handle this complexity.

People who are frequently infected with malaria

They get the infection, but they don't get ill.

My team went back to our complex parasite,

probed it with samples from Africans who had overcome malaria

"What does a successful antibody response look like?"

many of which are not on the radar for malaria vaccines.

My research community may be missing out important parts of the parasite.

Until recently, when one had identified a protein of interest,

they tested whether it might be important for a vaccine

This typically involved about 300 participants in a village in Africa,

whether antibodies to the protein would predict who got malaria

these studies have tested a small number of proteins

My team essentially collapsed 30 years of this type of research

into one exciting experiment, conducted over just three months.

Innovatively, we assembled 10,000 samples

from 15 locations in seven African countries,

spanning time, age and the variable intensity

We used omics intelligence to prioritize our parasite proteins,

and in short, recreated the malaria parasite on a chip.

We did this in Africa, and we're very proud of that.

We simultaneously gathered data on over 100 antibody responses.

The recipe behind a successful antibody response,

so that we can predict what might make a good malaria vaccine.

exactly what antibodies do to the parasite.

Do they attack from multiple angles? Is there synergy?

Our studies suggest that having a bit of one antibody won't be enough.

It might take high concentrations of antibodies

We're also learning that antibodies kill the parasite in multiple ways,

and studying any one of these in isolation may not adequately reflect reality.

Just like we can now see the parasite in greater definition,

on understanding how our bodies overcome this complexity.

We believe that this could provide the breakthroughs that we need

to make malaria history through vaccination.

Shoham Arad: OK, how close are we actually to a malaria vaccine?

Faith Osier: We're just at the beginning of a process

to try and understand what we need to put in the vaccine

So, we're not really close to the vaccine, but we're getting there.

SA: Tell me about SMART, tell me what does it stand for

FO: So SMART stands for South-South Malaria Antigen Research Partnership.

The South-South is referring to us in Africa,

looking sideways to each other in collaboration,

in contrast to always looking to America and looking to Europe,

when there is quite some strength within Africa.

apart from the goal that we have, to develop a malaria vaccine,

because the burden of disease in Africa is high,

and you need people who will continue to push the boundaries

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【TED】Faith Osier: The key to a better malaria vaccine (The key to a better malaria vaccine | Faith Osier)

essentially

incredible

approach

prioritize