Figure 1.

The malaria life cycle. An infected mosquito deposits motile infective sporozoites into the dermis of a susceptible host. Some sporozoites migrate to the liver, where they invade hepatocytes, multiply asexually to produce thousands of merozoites which egress in merosomes and rupture inside microvasculature of lungs. The merozoites invade the red blood cells (RBC), and undergo multiple cycles of ring, trophozoite and schizont stages, to initiate the clinical phase of the disease. Some parasites differentiate into male and female gametocytes, which are taken up mosquitoes during their next blood meal. Different immune cells interact with the malaria sporozoites during its journey from the skin to the liver and may be exploited in the development of an effective and long-lasting vaccine. NK denotes natural killer cells