Scripps Goal is New Vaccine for Malaria : Research: $2-million grant from Army will fund search for new type of vaccine to battle the scourge.

Scientists at Scripps Research Institute have been awarded a $2-million grant by the U.S. Army to develop a new kind of vaccine for malaria, an age-old scourge that still kills millions in underdeveloped nations and wreaks havoc on American fighting forces abroad, the research center announced Tuesday.

The research on producing antibodies to the malaria parasite holds the potential for widespread application to other diseases that afflict military and civilian populations, such as diphtheria, syphilis, Lyme disease, hepatitis and dengue fever, officials said.

“What the Army envisages is that we would have antibodies against different stages of malaria, and other diseases--all those really nasty things that there’s really nothing out there for,” said Angray S. Kang, principal investigator in the research project at Scripps.

“We’re interested in him making a library of antibodies,” said Col. Harry Dangerfield, executive assistant to the commanding general of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick, Md. “What he’s finding out . . . in terms of antibodies is of real interest and will be of great value in our attempts to develop” other vaccines.

Despite decades of worldwide effort to eradicate the malaria parasite and the mosquitoes that transmit the disease, sickness and death from the disease are “at almost unprecedented levels,” according to a 1991 report by the Institute of Medicine, an organization of prominent medical experts affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences.

The panel reported last year that the number of cases of malaria worldwide appeared to be increasing rapidly. About 300 million people are infected and 1 million to 2 million die annually.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, experts believed that malaria was one of the diseases that could be completely eradicated. But drugs used to treat the disease, like chloroquine, are no longer effective for many people because malarial parasites have become resistant to them. Mosquitoes have also become resistant to poisons used to kill them since use of the insecticide DDT was halted.

Malaria primarily affects people living in a wide swath around the Equator, including Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and much of South America, Kang said. The number of cases in the United States is still relatively small.

But when American military forces are sent abroad, the disease can become a major impediment to a war effort. Malaria was the top cause of lost soldier-days for U.S. troops during the Vietnam war, Dangerfield said. Military commanders have complained about malaria’s impact on their troops at least since World War I, Kang said.

Using a technique developed at Scripps in 1989, Kang hopes to isolate antibodies from the systems of people who have developed natural immunities to the disease, copy them and make them available to others.

The process is known as “passive immunization,” because individuals would not be required to develop the antibodies themselves as they do when they are vaccinated with dead or weakened pathogens.

“If you could make a passive reagent for malaria, then it should be possible to make passive reagents for other conditions,” said Kang, a 32-year-old British-educated scientist who last month was also chosen as one of five researchers nationwide to receive a prestigious four-year award to study cancer immunology.

Blood samples from volunteers around the globe who have developed antibodies to malaria will be taken, and Kang’s group will then try to solve the structure of antibodies and replicate them. Antibodies will be taken from an American volunteer who produced them after being bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito that was exposed to radiation, Kang said.

Half the five-year grant will be used at Scripps, while the rest will fund similar research on other diseases at Southwestern Medical Center at the University of Texas in Dallas.

In a separate research project, another team of Scripps researchers led by Arnold Satterthwait is working on another approach to developing a malaria vaccine.