We are proud to present a continuation of the story on potent afucosylated IgG #antibody responses we have been describing for more than decade in antibody responses to fetal blood cells. Those can causing life threatening thrombocytopenia or anaemia in the infants.
Earlier this year we described in Science Magazine how enveloped viruses also stimulate afucosylated responses with catastrophic consequences in COVID-19 patients.
Now we show in this Nature Communication paper, first authored by PhD student Mads Delbo Larsen, how this tendency is exceptionally strong in immune responses to Plasmodium falciparum (causing malaria) antigens found on Red blood cells, and how afucosylated IgG to these antigens leads to very strong killing activity of natural killer cells. In addition we show how this associates with protective responses in malaria, which are not induced by classical vaccination by protein subunit vaccines.
Many thanks to all the groups that helped us across the globe to help us pull this off (which took a lot of convincing), most of all to Prof. Lars Hviid at the Københavns Universitet - University of Copenhagen, his team and connections in the malaria field, and the team of Manfred Wuhrer at Leiden University Medical Center. This might go a long way to explain why malaria vaccine efforts have not yielded the protective responses we wish for against this devastating pathogen. The alternative way to look at this is this: collectively this shows also what we need to do to induce protective immune responses against malaria!