World Vaccine Congress Europe 2025

Poster sessions

Poster Title: High-Throughput SPR screening of next generation vaccine candidates for Plasmodium falciparum blood-stage malaria

Presenter: Dr. Kirsty McHugh, Senior Postdoctoral Research Scientist, University of Oxford

Abstract: Developing more effective malaria vaccines remains a global health priority. Rational design strategies have been applied to improve the stability and immunogenicity of RH5.1, a leading blood-stage malaria vaccine candidate that has demonstrated 55% efficacy in preventing clinical malaria in a recent Phase IIb clinical trial.  A central challenge in the design process is ensuring that engineered immunogens retain essential antibody-binding epitopes while optimizing other properties such as expression and stability. Here, we establish a high-throughput surface plasmon resonance (HT-SPR) screening method using a human recombinant monoclonal antibody (mAb) array and the Carterra LSA platform to support the design and evaluation of next-generation RH5-based vaccine candidates. This method allows rapid, quantitative assessment of antigen binding to epitope-specific mAbs, ensuring the preservation of key epitopes. Applied to a panel of RH5.1 variants, HT-SPR identifies candidates that maintain the epitopes of interest, which is crucial for eliciting targeted immune responses. This approach offers a powerful and scalable tool to accelerate the development of optimised RH5-based malaria vaccines.

Title: Accelerate Kinetic Screening and Epitope Characterization of Antibody Libraries with High Throughput SPR

Presenter: Andrew Goodhead, PhD, Carterra

Abstract: Throughput, speed, resolution, and sample consumption are typically key limiting factors for performing detailed kinetic and epitope characterization of monoclonal antibody (mAb) libraries destined for use as therapeutics. In addition, mAb immune responses can be used to survey the epitope landscape of pathogens and inform the design of more effective immunogens for vaccines. Here, we demonstrate three core applications of high throughput SPR: capture kinetics, epitope binning, and epitope mapping, that together provide a comprehensive characterization of your mAb library with minimal sample consumption, enabling more confident decisions to be made earlier in the research process and obviating the need for preliminary ELISA screening. We show that high throughput SPR can facilitate the generation of high-quality kinetic data from 384 mAbs in parallel, using < 1 μg per mAb and only 2 μg of antigen. Epitope binning in a 384-mAb array format allows for a rapid assessment of the depth and breadth of your library’s epitope diversity, providing exquisite resolution between near-identical clones, using < 5 μg per mAb and about 100 μg antigen. Finally, a large panel of mAbs can be mapped against a 384-peptide library, if their epitopes can be (partially) recapitulated on peptides, using 1 μg per mAb and <0.1 μg per peptide.