The wonder of worms and plants: WORMVACS2.0 at the Hydra Helminth Conference
Between 7 and 12 September 2025, parasitic worm researchers gathered in Hydra, Greece, for this year’s Helminth Conference. The event, which covers various areas of helminth research, represents a great opportunity to share the latest findings from the world of helminth parasitology. This year, researchers from the WORMVACS2.0 consortium also participated and contributed to the scientific discussions.
Prof Alison Elliott, Geartsje Bakker and Prof Maria Yazdanbakhsh at the Hydra Helminth Conference.
Prof Alison Elliott from the Uganda National Health Research Organisation, one of the principal investigators in the WORMVACS2.0 project, delivered the conference’s keynote lecture. Her presentation, titled “The wonder of worms – how parasitic helminths can change our lives”, delved into research about the wide-ranging effects of parasitic helminth infections on human health. Infections with parasitic worms continue to cause a massive health burden, and some of the subtle immunological shifts they cause can have wide-ranging, both detrimental and beneficial effects on human health. She outlined the existing research on how a helminth infection influences vaccine responses, infectious disease incidence, and non-communicable disease measures. Many questions remain about the mechanisms behind the observed effects, how helminths and other diseases interact, and how these lessons can contribute to the development of new health interventions. Prof Elliott concluded her speech with a call for future research in diverse populations to address the remaining unknowns in this field.
One of the potential new health interventions to tackle helminth infections is vaccines. The WORMVACS2.0 team’s goal is to establish an effective pipeline for helminth vaccine development, exploring innovative vaccine production platforms so far not applied in worm vaccine development: mRNA, outer membrane vesicles, and recombinant glycoproteins produced in plants. Geartsje Bakker, a PhD candidate at Wageningen University, presented the latter with a poster titled “A plant-based glycobiology-oriented approach for designing vaccines against trematode infections”.
The current drugs used to combat helminth infections are unsustainable due to frequent reinfections and the potential development of drug resistance; therefore, vaccines could be an essential alternative in managing helminth infections. The poster presented a study in which the researchers used a special plant-based system to produce potential vaccine candidates. They chose two specific vaccine targets from the worms: Cathepsin B1 from S. mansoni and Cathepsin L3 from F. hepatica. These are enzymes (proteases) that help the worms invade their hosts, feed, and interact with the host's immune system, and they have shown some promise in earlier vaccine studies. The critical step they've achieved is successfully producing these cathepsin enzymes in their plant system and, crucially, being able to engineer a variety of native sugar structures (N-glycans) onto them, mimicking those found in the actual parasites. The ultimate goal of this research is to use this plant platform to find out if adding these correct N-glycan sugar elements can make these cathepsin-based vaccines more protective against parasitic worms. It will also help them better understand the specific role these sugar structures play in shaping the body's immune response against parasites.
If you’d like to learn more, you can view the poster here.
