Malaria is a vector-borne disease caused by Plasmodium parasites. In an exciting new study, Ganley et al. harness the power of mRNA vaccines to summon tissue-resident memory T cells to battle the parasite as it replicates in the liver.
Malaria is a vector-borne disease caused by Plasmodium parasites. As an infected female Anopheles mosquito takes a blood meal, it deposits motile sporozoites into the skin of the individual it feeds on, which travel to the liver to infect hepatocytes in the asymptomatic liver stage of infection. Upon hepatocyte rupture, merozoites are released and enter the bloodstream, where they infect erythrocytes to cause the symptomatic blood stage of infection1. Blood-stage sexual stages are then produced and can infect new mosquitoes to maintain the lifecycle. This complex multistage lifecycle provides multiple strategic points of attack in the rational design of more effective vaccines. One such strategy involves eliciting CD8+ T cells to attack infected hepatocytes during the asymptomatic liver stage. In this issue of Nature Immunology, Ganley et al.2 demonstrate that the combination of an mRNA lipid nanoparticle (LNP) vaccine targeting the liver stage of infection with a natural killer T