Development of High Throughput Bioassays to Identify Correlates of Protective Immunity Against Malaria

Malaria currently affects 300-500 million people worldwide and leads to about 2 million deaths annually. Development of a vaccine is critical to reducing the number of deaths and disability. BioTraces, Inc. applied its proprietary detection method called Multi-Photon Detection (MPD) to measuring protein levels and developed two types of super-sensitive immunoassays, IA/MPD and Super-ELISA. These assays have about one hundred-fold higher sensitivity than prior art protein quantitation methods. In this proposal, MPD immunoassays will be used to measure cytokine levels in the blood to characterize the immune response to vaccination. In Phase I, we will: develop assays for TGFB1, IL-2 and IL-5; study the variation of cytokine levels with age, especially, TGFB1, IFNgamma, TFNgamma, IL-2, IL-4, IL-5, IL-6, IL-8, IL-10 and IL-12 levels in healthy men and women, with a focus on children; and use the newly developed and existing assays to measure the immune response to vaccination. In Phase II, P-chips/MPD will be developed to perform a complete immunoprofile from a single blood sample.