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Jennifer Bronson Reiman ’05, Ph.D., is a member of an Australian university research team that has developed a new vaccine against malaria that is moving into human trials. The vaccine has been shown to be safe in mice and shows promise against multiple strains of malaria.

The disease – carried by mosquitoes – sickens almost 250 million people each year and causes about a million deaths annually – primarily among African children under the age of five years old. The malaria vaccine research was published in the July issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Reiman is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Glycomics at Griffith University on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. She was a biology major, a passionate cross country and track-and-field competitor and an academic achiever who was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honors society while at Íæż½ã½ã.

As an undergrad, she collaborated with Biology Professor Cynthia Norton on several research projects that were accepted for presentation at national and state scientific societies, as well as for publication in the Journal of Molluscan Studies. Reiman also collaborated on an honors research project with Biology Professor Kay Tweeten on the “Role of CCL20 in Anti-tumor Response with Implications for the Treatment of Human Cancers."

Reiman, along with Institute Principal Research Leader Michael Good, was interviewed by an Australian television station about the new vaccine and she has authored an article for the academic news site, The Conversation.

Griffith University's research collaborators include the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, the Department of Agricultural Sciences and Centre for AgriBioscience at La Trobe University in Victoria, the University of Alberta in Canada and Hope College in Michigan. The Maryland biotechnology company, Sanaria Inc., is also a member of the research team.

By Julie Michener