Researchers said Wednesday they had discovered a unique microscopic channel through which malaria parasites must pass to infect red blood cells, a finding that opens up a highly promising target for a vaccine. The doorway mechanism is common to all known strains of the deadliest mosquito-borne pathogen, Plasmodium falciparum, which means that a future vaccine could in theory work against all of them, according to the study published in the journal Nature. The death toll from malaria has declined by a fifth over the last decade, but the disease still claims some 800,000 lives every year, mostly children under five in sub-Saharan Africa.
“Our findings were unexpected and have completely changed the way in which we view the invasion process,” said Gavin Wright of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the study’s senior co-author. The breakthrough “seems to have revealed an Achilles’ heel in the way the parasite invades our red blood cells.”