Developing vaccines against malaria

Malaria is one of the world’s leading causes of death and illness, particularly among young children. There remains a strong need for highly effective vaccines to reduce the burden of malaria and progress towards eventual malaria elimination. To date, most vaccines have achieved only modest levels of efficacy, emphasising the need for novel approaches in vaccine design that can induce potent immune responses to enable malaria elimination. This project will focus on identifying key antigens and specific epitopes that are targets of protective immunity against malaria. and using knowledge of immunity to malaria for informing vaccine design, and the design and testing of novel vaccine candidates. These studies will use novel approaches in molecular biology, cell biology and immunology to address these aims, and will build on recent major advances generated from our malaria vaccine program. The project will have a particular focus on using mRNA vaccine technology to include multiple antigens, and will be linked with the broader mRNA vaccine program at Burnet. The project will primarily involve laboratory-based research, including western blotting, imaging, standard immunoassays, functional immunoassays (E.g neutralisation assays, cell-mediated immunity), cell culture and protein expression. The project could also include bio-informatics, structural modelling of vaccine antigens, or modelling vaccine impact depending on the student’s interest and background. The specific activities and focus of the project will be refined to suit the interests and training background of the student and research priorities in the group. All enquiries relating to this project should be sent to Chrissie Collins - chrissie.collins@burnet.edu.au