Last Updated: 13/08/2025
Enabling rapid conversion of antigen to vaccine, applied to multi-stage malaria vaccination
Objectives
The goal of this study is to advance a fast, flexible, and broadly applicable “Plug-and-Display” vaccine platform that uses a “bacterial superglue” to easily and irreversibly attach pathogen proteins to virus-like particles (VLPs), with a primary focus on developing an effective malaria vaccine.
Vaccination is one of the most cost-effective ways to save lives and improve health. Despite the great success stories of many human and animal vaccines, there is still a lack of effective vaccines against major global killers such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV. New vaccines are often developed from Virus-like particles (VLPs). VLPs resemble viruses in their size and shape, but carry no pathogenic genetic material and so do not cause disease. VLPs can be engineered to display a protein from a pathogen on their surface, to create an effective and safe vaccine. Decorating VLPs with such proteins from pathogens is one of the central challenges in the field of vaccine development, requiring expensive trial-and-error experiments and taking months to years.
The researchers have validated initial steps to overcome this key challenge. They engineered a “bacterial superglue” so that decorating VLPs simply requires mixing the VLP with the pathogenic protein. This attachment is fast, irreversible, and broadly applicable. Due to the ease of the process, the researchers have termed this platform Plug-and-Display vaccination.
The pathogenic proteins they have focused on attaching to VLPs come from the malaria parasite. Malaria is one of the largest global health challenges, each year infecting approximately two million people and killing half a million people. With the difficulty in distributing effective drugs and the increase in drug resistance, there is urgent need to develop a malaria vaccine. The team has investigated proteins on the surface of the malaria parasite at different stages of its life cycle and established key targets that could help create a more effective vaccine.
In this proposal, they will advance the Plug-and-Display vaccination approach in several ways, to maximise the immune responses to these malarial proteins. They will establish the use of their bacterial superglue for decoration of a different kind of VLP frequently used in the clinic. They will create new VLPs able to display three times more copies of the malarial protein, since that could stimulate an even stronger immune response. Also, VLPs will be precisely decorated with two different malarial proteins, to help generate a vaccine effective against a wider range of malaria strains.
Since their Plug-and-Display VLPs could be useful not just for malaria but for a range of human and animal diseases, they will also increase the scale and stability of VLPs they produce, so that they can be a general resource for scientists worldwide and speed up the creation of effective vaccines against major health challenges.
Dec 2016 — Jan 2020
$999,559
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