Stefan Kappe

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April 25, 2012 | 12:10 PM | By  | 

Infectious hope: When getting malaria makes sense | 

Flickr, Aya Rosen

It’s World Malaria Day. There’s been great progress against malaria over the past decade but most experts agree the best hope is to find an effective vaccine. Seattle Biomed is one of the world leaders in malaria vaccine research, but testing these experimental vaccines relies on people volunteering to get the vaccine — and get bitten. What it’s like to get infected for science.

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By Cyan James, special correspondent

Cyan James

Lane Rasberry wants to better arm the world against malaria

“I’m going to get infected and I’m going to love it,” Lane Rasberry says with a smile.

Rasberry is about to spend at least five minutes with more than a dozen mosquitoes full of malaria parasites.

The mosquitoes huddle in a screened, pint-sized container, waiting for Rasberry to roll up his left sleeve, lay his forearm over the container, and drape a towel over his arm to simulate night. Then they launch, feeding on Lane until their breakfast clock runs out.

A Wikipedia editor by day, Rasberry also volunteers in a malaria vaccine trial at Seattle BioMed, where he belongs among a unique group of clinical subjects who intentionally get infected.

Why? For Rasberry, it’s because the research is both altruistic and convenient, and because it plays to his interest in science. “I actually enjoy participating,” he says, emphasizing research trials’ ability to create community and help others learn about scientific advances. Plus, since he grew up in Texas, the mosquitoes don’t really faze him.

Seattle Biomed, Earl Harper

Mosquito dissection

After Rasberry’s five minutes are up, a technician dumps his mosquitoes into an ethanol bath to kill them, then flicks off the mosquitoes’ heads, presses their torsos to extrude their innards, and swiftly isolates their salivary glands.

Cyan James

Skeeter dissection

The technician scans the tiny sickle-shaped glands under a microscope, searching for P. falciparum, the parasite that infects up to 500 million people with malaria every year and kills nearly two people every hour.

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FILED UNDER: Health, Science, Cyan James, malaria, Malcolm Gardner, Sara Healy, Seattle Biomed, Stefan Kappe, vaccine
February 7, 2011 | 3:14 PM | By  | 

New skeeter bugs malaria control campaign | 

CDC

Anopheles gambiae

One of the big news stories in the malaria world recently is the discovery, announced last week in the journal Science, of a previously unknown type of mosquito that some reports said could threaten malaria control efforts in Africa.

Here’s the problem: Most malaria control efforts in Africa — bednets, spraying — are aimed at preventing mosquitoes from biting humans indoors at night. This newly discovered mosquito, dubbed “Goundry” (after the community in Burkina Faso where it was identified), appears to operate outdoors. The news reports:

After reading a number of these stories that cited the scientists who made this discovery warning that this new skeeter could undermine the massive — and apparently fairly successful — ongoing effort to reduce malaria deaths and disease in Africa, I decided to get a second opinion.

I asked Stefan Kappe, a malaria expert at Seattle Biomed, for his thoughts on this. Kappe and his colleagues are working on a number of fronts to combat malaria, including testing a genetically engineered malaria parasite for use as a vaccine.

Seattle Biomed

Stefan Kappe

“If it turns out that this mosquito is a significant vector for human malaria, the whole malaria control strategy will fail,” said Kappe. But that, he says, remains a big “if” because it’s quite possible this particular sub-type is one of those that doesn’t bite humans.

The species Anopheles gambiae, of which the Goundry bug is a subtype, does transmit malaria and Goundry has been shown to carry the malaria parasite.

But it’s worth considering that, in the mosquito world, there are some 3,500 known species of mosquito — most which don’t carry malaria and most of which aren’t attracted to biting humans for their blood meal.

“What they did not show is that this mosquito will actually bite and transmit malaria to humans,” said Kappe. “It might seem like a trivial question but it’s not really.”

FILED UNDER: Health, Science, malaria, mosquito, Seattle Biomed, Stefan Kappe