Antibody epitope team (EPITOPE)

The EPITOPE team is a newly established team at CMP with a focus on monoclonal antibodies and epitope-based vaccinology.

We will investigate how to elucidate the characteristics of highly protective monoclonal antibodies and transform the knowledge into multivalent vaccines.

The aim of the research is to generate vaccines, that are capable of efficiently focusing an immune response towards the protective antibody epitopes only and generate the appropriate types of antibodies, concerning affinity, subclass and Fc-glycosylation. We select and characterize protective monoclonal antibodies and investigate and compare diverse ways of presenting multiple epitopes using virus like particles (VLPs) as well as other vaccine platforms. The initial model pathogen for the research will be malaria caused by P. falciparum. Further venture into antibodies against other complex pathogens will follow.

The EPITOPE team will have a strong biotechnical expertise in the following areas:

1. monoclonal antibody production and characterisation
2. antibody systems serology
3. functional pathogen inhibition assays
4. B-cell bioinformatics
5. protein engineering

The team has close collaborations with researchers at University of Oxford, The Sanger Institute in Cambridge, University of Ghana as well as the other teams at CMP.

For more information about this team, please contact the EPITOPE team leader