GLURP malaria vaccine development team

Team GLURP

Mission and vision

An estimated 1 million children die from malaria each year on the African continent. Our mission is the development of vaccines to control the severity of malaria cases.

The GLURP team

We are an international team, consisting of scientists, medical doctors and students from different continents. The team leader Michael Theisen is the inventor of GMZ2, a malaria vaccine candidate that is currently in phase IIb clinical trial in Africa. Besides continuing the development of the GMZ2 vaccine candidate, we aim at developing assays for monitoring the quantitative and qualitative immune response to vaccine candidates and various known malaria antigens. Part of our research is immunogenetics, which involves looking at the host genetic factors that may influence host immune response to and the outcome of malaria infection. New areas of research within the group are development of transmission blocking and multi-stage vaccines.
The GLURP team is situated partly at Centre for Medical Parasitology (CMP) and partly at Department of Clinical Biochemistry and Immunology, Statens Serum Institut (SSI).

Focus of research

  • Vaccine development
  • Antigen production
  • Adjuvant/Formulation
  • Clinical trials
  • Immunology
  • In vitro functional assays
  • Humoral immunity
  • Immunogenetics
  • Susceptibility to disease

The lab-work is mainly focused on genetics, serology, molecular biology and protein chemistry, where some of the techniques applied are flow cytometry, bead-based assays (Luminex), PCR, protein expression (BioFlo-310 2.5 L bioreactor), purification (ÄKTAcrossflow and ÄKTAxpress chromatography systems) and characterization (SDS-PAGE, Western blotting, ELISA).

External collaborators

  • EMVDA
  • AMANET
  • Dr. Sanjay Singh (Gennova Biopharmaceuticals, Pune, India)
  • Prof. Robert W. Sauerwein (Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center)
  • Daniel Dodoo University of Southern Denmark, Denmark and Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research5, University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana
  • Peter Højrup Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology6, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
  • Subhash Singh Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine Canal Road, Jammu, India
  • Randall F. Howard Infectious Disease Research Institute, 1124 Columbia Street, Suite 400, Seattle, WA 98104, USA

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