New Article Published in Nature Communications: 'Development of clinical immunity to Plasmodium vivax following repeat controlled human malaria infection'

Results from our group’s P. vivax repeat controlled human malaria infection study has now been published in Nature Communications. This study was the first ever clinical trial where participants underwent multiple, repeat infections with P. vivax and P. falciparum and established an experimental model of clinical immunity to P. vivax malaria. The VAC069 clinical trial was conducted in Oxford, with immunological analyses being conducted with our collaborators Phil Spence (University of Edinburgh) and Julian Rayner (University of Cambridge).

Our study showed that clinical immunity develops rapidly after a single infection with P. vivax and reduces the symptoms and laboratory abnormalities during repeat P. vivax infection. This is underpinned by an attenuation of inflammation upon repeat P. vivax infection. Clinical immunity developed independently of anti-parasite immunity and no reduction in parasitaemia was observed during repeat P. vivax infection. We also showed that the development of clinical immunity is species-specific, as prior infection with P. vivax did not protect against repeat infection with P. falciparum. The rapid development of clinical immunity to P. vivax is also in contrast to the lack of significant clinical immunity observed during our previous repeat P. falciparum infection studies and underlines the differences in parasite biology between these two species.

Access to the full text of the article can be found here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63104-y, as well as via our Publications page.