Abstract
Recently licensed subunit vaccines represent the first and, thus far, the only approved agents for vaccination against malaria. However, these vaccines still fail to confer highly effective long-lasting protective immunity. Whole-organism vaccines, employing attenuated Plasmodium sporozoites as immunization agents, constitute a promising alternative for highly effective malaria vaccination. In this issue of EMBO Molecular Medicine, Goswami et al (2024) report on the generation and pre-clinical characterization of genetically attenuated Plasmodium parasites, termed LARC2, whose development arrests at late stages of liver infection. Their results warrant the clinical evaluation of PfSPZ-LARC2 towards its use as a whole-organism vaccine against malaria.