Angela Minassian

Malaria vaccine specialist

Chief Investigator in Malaria Vaccine and Challenge studies at the Draper Laboratory, University of Oxford, and Honorary Consultant Infectious Diseases

I am an infectious diseases doctor by training and lead a clinical malaria vaccine programme at the University of Oxford. This involves testing first-time-in-human vaccines against malaria, using controlled human malaria infection, where we deliberately infect healthy volunteers with malaria in a controlled safe setting. The most promising of these vaccine candidates are then selected to proceed to field efficacy trials in endemic areas and we are excited to currently have two promising candidates in efficacy trials in Burkina Faso.

To-date I have led on 23 malaria clinical studies and I am passionate about building relationships and transferring skills to empower the research teams where malaria is endemic. This year I am leading a new UK-EC-African consortium called “MVC-2G”, bringing together academics, non-profits and industrial partners, including those from LMICs, in a new partnership. This consortium aims to pursue a pathway to licensure for an optimised high-efficacy 2nd-generation paediatric vaccine for Plasmodium falciparum malaria, and will also establish a South-South network for African scientists that can facilitate hands on training in clinical vaccine science and laboratory-based vaccine production and analysis.

Using the platform of the malaria human challenge model, our team also hopes to better understand mechanisms of tolerance to malaria disease and we have recently developed a novel model of relapse for Plasmodium vivax malaria (a type of malaria that hibernates in the liver but that can reactivate/”relapse” to cause disease at any time). With this novel model we hope to test vaccines or drugs for their efficacy against relapsing disease.