L (Lisa) Nijhof BSc

Research:

Optimizing glyco-engineering of vaccine candidates against cow and sheep parasites.

It is essential to create vaccines against helminths. Vaccine development currently depends on collecting naturally secreted proteins from the parasite itself. It is not efficient to produce these vaccines on a large scale, because to obtain these worm secreted proteins, animals must be infected. After the infection, these animals are sacrificed to collect these worm secreted proteins. This would be unethical and costs a lot of time and money.

Currently there are vaccine candidates produced in different production systems, like bacteria, yeast, or mammalian cells. These production systems have differences from each other. For example, they produce different kind of glycan structures, and these glycan structures are not similar to the glycan structures of helminths. Glycans are carbohydrate-based polymers (or polysaccharides) made by all living organisms. They are essential biomolecules for serving structure, energy storage and system regulatory purposes.

The development of a recombinant helminth vaccines is not successful yet and the creation of these vaccines could be limited by the reconstruction of natural glycan structures of helminth glycoproteins.

To make efficient vaccines against helminths, it seems essential to look closely at the sugar composition of the vaccine. The development of an efficient expression platform in which glycosylation can be manipulated is necessary.

During my research I focus on the glyco-engineering of the sugar composition of this vaccine. With the use of a plant as an expression platform. Plants are known to tolerate changes in their glycosylation pathway, this allows modification of recombinant glycoproteins in a stable and controlled manner.