SYDNEY, June 14 (Xinhua) -- Aussie researchers on Thursday said they have discovered a novel process used by the human immune system to kill and clear malaria.

The discovery could help develop highly effective vaccines for the global disease.

The research is touted as the first of its kind to establish that antibodies produced by the immune system interacting with important proteins in the blood to block malarial infection, the researchers from the Burnet Institute medical research facility said in a statement.

"Studies have already shown that antibodies on their own can inhibit malaria, but we found that if antibodies recruit complement proteins this inhibitory activity was greatly increased," said researcher Liriye Kurtovic, who led the study published in medical journal BMC Medicine.

"Even when antibodies were tested at low concentrations, adding complement enhanced the overall effect," she said, adding that refining antibody responses to improve their interaction with the complement proteins could "substantially enhance their ability to prevent infection and potentially prevent clinical malaria disease".

The World Health Organization has set an ambitious goal to license a malaria vaccine that is at least 75 percent efficacious against clinical malaria by 2030, they said.

"These findings have revealed a new mechanism of immunity that we can exploit to develop a much more effective and long-lasting malaria vaccine," said the institute's malaria research head Professor James Beeson.

Rising drug and insecticide resistance have made the fight against global malaria more pressing, with about half a million deaths still resulting from an estimated 200 million cases of the infection worldwide annually, said the researchers.

"One-third of the world's population is at risk of malaria, so an effective vaccine is the ultimate end game with the potential to save millions of lives," said Kurtovic.