Vaccines against
infectious diseases have had great successes in the history of public health. Major breakthroughs have occurred in the development of
vaccine-based interventions against viral and bacterial pathogens through the application of classical
vaccine design strategies. In contrast the development of a
malaria vaccine has been slow.
Plasmodium falciparum malaria affects millions of people with nearly half of the world population at risk of
infection. Decades of dedicated research has taught us that developing an effective
vaccine will be time consuming, challenging, and expensive. Nevertheless, recent advancements such as the optimization of robust
protein synthesis platforms, high-throughput immunoscreening approaches, reverse vaccinology, structural design of immunogens, lymphocyte repertoire sequencing, and the utilization of artificial intelligence, have renewed the prospects of an accelerated discovery of the key
antigens in
malaria. A deeper understanding of the major factors underlying the immunological and molecular mechanisms of
malaria might provide a comprehensive approach to identifying novel and highly efficacious
vaccines. In this review we discuss progress in novel
antigen discoveries that leverage on the wheat germ cell-free
protein synthesis system (WGCFS) to accelerate
malaria vaccine development.