Vaccine stops deadly sand-fly-spread scourge in animal test
DNA immunization protects hamsters and mice from Leishmania parasite
By Nathan Seppa
A lethal parasite appears susceptible to an experimental vaccine that seizes upon the scourge’s apparatus for invading cells.
Researchers prompted animals’ immune systems to destroy Leishmania protozoa by inducing mass-production of the very protein receptor that the parasites use as a pry bar to break into blood cells. Alerting the immune system to the receptor protein protects mice and hamsters against the parasites, the scientists report in the Sept. 11 Science Translational Medicine.
Leishmania parasites are spread by the bite of sand flies. They cause skin infections and sometimes deadly swelling of internal organs. There is no vaccine to prevent leishmaniasis disease, which affects around 12 million people. What’s more, the drugs used for the visceral form are “costly, limited and toxic,” wrote biologist Naomi Dunning-Foreman in Bioscience Horizons in 2009 while at Nottingham Trent University in England.