Despite increased funding towards malaria research and vaccine development, the number of deaths from the parasitic disease returned over the past three years to the high numbers seen in 2012, with more than 600,000 deaths annually. That adds up to more than four times as many total deaths in sub-Saharan Africa as COVID-19 caused in 2020 and 2021. To combat the disease, scientists agree they need to improve the production process of malaria vaccines, which began rolling out in 2022. To that end, a group of researchers has documented the first successful cultivation of the necessary vaccine ingredients in vitro. The innovation, reported December 7 in Nature, could improve vaccine production efficiency by tenfold, the study authors say, and make malaria research cheaper and faster.
“This is a major breakthrough,” says Alon Warburg, a microbiologist and entomologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who wasn’t involved in the research, but ...
