Immunity to Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) malaria is only acquired after years of repeated infections and wanes rapidly without ongoing parasite exposure. Antibodies are central to malaria immunity, yet little is known about the B-cell biology that underlies the inefficient acquisition of Pf-specific humoral immunity. This year-long prospective study in Mali of 185 individuals aged 2 to 25 years shows that Pf-specific memory B-cells and antibodies are acquired gradually in a stepwise fashion over years of repeated Pf exposure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAntibodies play a key role in controlling blood stage malaria infections, and an effective blood stage malaria vaccine will likely require that it induce vaccine-specific memory B cells (MBCs). Our previous studies showed that the addition of the TLR9 agonist CpG to Plasmodium falciparum protein subunit vaccines greatly increased their efficacy in inducing MBCs in nonimmune U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite the central role of memory B cells (MBC) in protective immune responses, little is understood about how they are acquired in naive individuals in response to Ag exposure, and how this process is influenced by concurrent activation of the innate immune system's TLR. In this longitudinal study of malaria-naive individuals, we examined the MBC response to two candidate malaria vaccines administered with or without CpG, a TLR9 ligand. We show that the acquisition of MBC is a dynamic process in which the vaccine-specific MBC pool rapidly expands and then contracts, and that CpG enhances the kinetics, magnitude, and longevity of this response.
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