PEOPLE are being offered £6,885 if they agree to be injected with malaria up to three times.
The Jenner Institute will pay the “salary” to human guinea pigs to help find a cure for the mozzie-borne disease that kills 400,000 every year.
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The institute, based in Headington, Oxfordshire, says volunteers must be aged 18 to 50 and in good health.
‘HAS TO BE DONE’
They must not have had malaria or travelled in the past six months to a region where the disease is endemic.
In the two-year trial, participants will be given a vaccine then injected up to three times with a common form of the bug, Plasmodium vivax.
“Ultimately, in order to test whether a potential new vaccine works, we need to be able to ‘challenge’ vaccinated volunteers with P. vivax malaria infection” says the research team.
“We can do this by deliberately infecting volunteers who have been vaccinated, then observing to see if they are protected from malaria infection, or if they develop infection more slowly than volunteers who have not been vaccinated.”
The scientists said there is ‘considerable experience’ performing this type of study with the commonest form of malaria, P. falciparum.
But, they added, within Europe this sort of deliberate infection has not previously been carried out with P. vivax malaria, although the method has been safely conducted in Australia.
The first phase of the study took place in January with six volunteers to assess dosage.
