Rhoel Dinglasan, a Filipino entomologist and biologist at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland has discovered a new vaccine against malaria. I’m no med student or doctor, but for millions of people–children–in Africa, this could save their lives. As an aside, how can you not mistake the name Rhoel for Filipino? I’m just saying.

Dinglasan has found an antigen, called AnAPN1, that causes humans to create antibodies that prevent transmission of malaria by mosquitoes. Get enough of these antibodies into mosquitoes, and you lock the disease up there and prevent it from infecting us. Sounds good, but how do you implement such a strategy? You can hardly vaccinate the mosquitoes themselves. Instead, you put the AnAPN1 into their food source: us. A mosquito that bites an inoculated person would pick up the antibodies and then be sidelined from the malaria-transmission game.

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