Now published in Nature Communications - Development of an improved blood-stage malaria vaccine targeting the essential RH5-CyRPA-RIPR invasion complex

The Draper group are happy to announce that our new paper “Development of an improved blood-stage malaria vaccine targeting the essential RH5-CyRPA-RIPR invasion complex” has now been published in Nature Communications. 

In this paper we describe an analysis of monoclonal antibodies that bind the RCR-complex and show that only mAbs that can bind the pre-formed RH5-CyRPA-RIPR invasion complex (RCR-complex) have neutralizing activity. We then go on to show that mAbs against different antigens in the complex can work together to more effectively block malaria red-blood cell invasion. We attempted to use this knowledge to create an RCR-complex vaccine, however this vaccine underperformed compared to our lead vaccine candidate RH5. We show that this is because the RIPR antigen lacks potency and is immunodominant. We refined the RIPR portion of the vaccine and fused it to CyRPA to create a novel vaccine that we called “R78C”.

We show that a combination of R78C + RH5 outperforms RH5 alone in animal models – this is the first blood stage vaccine to show improvement on RH5 alone. R78C + RH5 has now entered Phase 1 clinical trials (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05385471 and we eagerly await the results!