“Most failures, are failures of imagination,” says Bill Shore author of the book The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men: Inspiration, Vision and Purpose in the Quest to End Malaria, which highlights the work of scientist and visionary Stephen Hoffman, a man who went so far as to allow 3,000 mosquitoes to bite him in order to try and find the vaccine for malaria. Before he let the bloodsuckers loose on him though, he radiated them to weaken the malaria-causing sporozoites. Lucky for him the experiment left him immune to malaria.

That was in the mid-1990s. Since then Hoffman has developed a system to extract parasites from the salivary gland of infected mosquitoes, which he then irradiates and injects into the veins of human subjects in the hopes of creating immunity.

Hoffman, who is now the chief executive and founder at Sanaria, Inc., a company he founded, is on a quest to find a vaccine for malaria, which kills 800,000 people annually.

He thought he was close to finding a vaccine once before, though. In the mid-1980s, he worked with a team of military doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center to attach malaria proteins to molecules the immune system recognizes, hoping the immune system would go after the molecule and attack the parasite. After injecting themselves with the vaccine, Hoffman and his team let the infected mosquitoes bite them. The result: All but one of them contracted malaria.

But after decades of research, Hoffman, once again, believed he was on the verge of a malaria vaccine. Nevertheless, in Sept. 2010 he had to admit another failure. Out of 80 subjects vaccinated with Sanaria's malaria vaccine, only five were protected from infection in the first clinical trial. Yet Hoffman has not given up on his life’s work.

The next challenge is figuring out how to continue to fund his research, before another 800,000 lives are lost.