Dr. Stephen Hoffman has done what many considered to be the impossible.

As the founder and CEO of the biotech company Sanaria, Hoffman created a vaccine that offers 100 percent immunity from malaria. While vaccines for viruses like polio and bacteria like tetanus have been around for decades, his vaccine is the first that completely protects you from the malaria parasite, the leading cause of death in many developing countries. After ten long years of work on the vaccine, Hoffman published his findings this past August, and the vaccine is currently under trial. But while his historical discovery may seem like the end of a long journey, it's really just the beginning. The vaccine isn't yet ready for market, and Hoffman must now figure out how to make enough of the stuff to truly put a dent in the world's malaria problem.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are 3.4 billion people around the world who are currently at risk of contracting malaria. In 2012 alone, says the World Health Organization, 207 million people contracted the disease, and 627,000 died from it. Hoffman's vaccine certainly has the potential to reduce these numbers, but there's a catch. The vaccine is made up of tiny malaria parasites that have been treated with radiation while living in the salivary glands of mosquitoes, and today, extracting these parasites involves a powerful microscope and a highly trained human hand to dissect the mosquito. It's an almost artisanal process, one that Hoffman knows could prevent the vaccine from reaching a truly large number of people.

That's why he and his company are building the SporoBot. Developed in partnership with the Harvard Biorobotics Laboratory, the SporoBot is a robot that can do all the delicate work that goes into making the vaccine, with one crucial difference: It can do it 20 to 30 times faster. That could be the secret to finally bringing Hoffman's vaccine to the people who need it most.

Hoffman is currently raising $250,000 on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo to develop a working prototype. That's an unorthodox move from a company that has spent some $120 million developing the vaccine and has received millions of dollars in grant funding from the likes of the Gates Foundation and the National Institute for Health. But grant funding can be slow. Hoffman hopes the crowd is quicker. "Between 1,000 and 3,000 children will die today of malaria," he says. "We have to leave no stone unturned in getting this done and getting it done as fast as possible."

Three Decades in the Making

Hoffman has been working on the malaria problem for nearly three decades, starting as a Naval doctor in Jakarta, Indonesia, specializing in tropical diseases. For years, he treated patients and watched "many, many, many young Indonesians die" in his care from malaria. Passionate as he was about treating patients, though, he eventually realized that he could have a much bigger impact if he could develop a vaccine to eradicate the disease altogether.

Hoffman has resorted to extreme measures in the name of this mission. Once, he subjected himself to the bite of 3,000 mosquitoes, after discovering an unusual method of vaccination that first arose in the 1970s. At the time, researchers found that after volunteers were bitten by 1,000 malaria-infected mosquitoes that had been treated with radiation, they developed immunity to malaria. When Hoffman tested the theory with 3,000 mosquitoes, not only did it make him immune to malaria, but it became the basis for Sanaria's current vaccine.

Rather than forcing people to endure thousands of mosquito bites, Hoffman figured there must be a way to grow these parasites and inject them into the body. In 2002, he founded Sanaria from his kitchen table to figure out how to do just that. It wasn't easy. First, the team had to figure out how to make sterile mosquitoes, how to make them live long enough, how to make them feed, and how to extract the parasites, purify, and preserve them. At the same time, Hoffman had to find a way to raise money for this research at the height of the global recession and in the face of a barrage of criticism from the scientific community.

'A Gift From Heaven'

By 2010, Sanaria launched its first clinical trial of the vaccine and found–to Hoffman's utter disappointment–that it didn't offer subjects the level of protection he was looking for. "We come to work every single day with the idea that we're working on something that, when we succeed, will save millions of lives," he says. "It's an incredible way to live your life, but at the same time, when it doesn't work, it can be really problematic."

The vaccine failed primarily because it was being injected into the skin. Hoffman guessed that if it were given intravenously, it would be more potent. He was right. In 2012, Sanaria launched its another trial, during which the vaccine was given intravenously, and by the end of it, the trial subjects were still 100 percent immune. "It was a gift from heaven," he says, remembering that day. "It was a treasure."

The vaccine is still undergoing clinical trials and will be tested on some 500 volunteers in seven sites around the world this year. If successful, Sanaria will still have to wrestle with substantial logistical problems. For instance, the vaccine must be preserved in liquid nitrogen, which could pose a delivery challenge. The intravenous method of delivery could also make mass vaccination campaigns a challenge, says Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "It would be important to determine if the vaccine can be administered in a different and less difficult form, such as intramuscularly, with similar good results," he says.

Sanaria, he says, must also prove that its vaccine is as effective in the field as it is in highly controlled experiments. "If the high degree of efficacy of the Sanaria vaccine holds up under ongoing field trials, then this would be very important and encouraging," Dr. Fauci says.

But the biggest hurdle, in Hoffman's opinion, will be scale.

Enter the Robot

That's why, about two years ago, he began working with Harvard Biorobotics Lab to begin developing a robot that could produce mass quantities of the vaccine. That too, says Yaroslav Tenzer, who helped design the SporoBot, was a major technological undertaking. "Mosquitoes are very small and fragile," he says. "Dissecting them and extracting the saliva glands in a sterile environment is a big manipulation challenge."

But over the course of two years, Tenzer and his team managed to design working prototypes for each step of the process. First, the machines must restrain the mosquito. Then they pick it up, dissect it, extract the saliva gland, and collect it. Each step requires sophisticated image processing technology to ensure the right parts are being dissected and extracted. Now, Sanaria is trying to raise the money to put all the pieces together to build the SporoBot, a machine that wouldn't be much larger than a microwave.

Once a basic prototype is built, Tenzer expects other roboticists will join in and help optimize the SporoBot. "But first, basic research needs to be done," he says, "and that's what we're doing."

As of Monday, Sanaria had raised just over $35,000 of its $250,000 with just four days left, a testament to just how difficult it is to crowdfund a product that you can't give away as a perk for donating. Still, Hoffman says even if Sanaria can't meet its crowdfunding goal, he won't stop until he finds the funding somewhere. It is, he says, quite literally a matter of life or death. "I'm envisioning total success," he says. "I won't be in a situation where we can't produce enough of this vaccine in the most rapid period of time because we don't have robots doing this one part of the process."