Jasmin's work is part of The Future Vaccine Manufacturing Research Hub (Vax-Hub), led by UCL Biochemical Engineering (Prof. Martina Micheletti) and The Jenner Institute, University of Oxford (Prof. Sarah Gilbert) with a number of academic and industrial partners. The Hub’s vision is to make the UK the global centre for integrated discovery through to bioprocess manufacture of next generation vaccines.

Her current project aims to develop and validate scale-down approaches for conjugate vaccine production for early acquisition of process development data, as well as scaling correlations for targeted process steps. The position concerns engineering characterisation studies, miniaturisation and automation studies, in addition to development of scale-down tools and methodologies.

The main focus of the project is in close collaboration with researchers at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for the optimisation of glycoconjugate vaccine production using their Protein Glycan Coupling Technology (PGCT). Dr Samaras' role initially was to develop a whole process automated screening platform for the optimisation studies at the microscale, in addition to establishing scaling correlations for the eventual scale up of the glycoconjugate vaccine production platform.

Previous work encompassed the experimental investigation of the flow, mixing and suspension dynamics within a commercial stirred tank bioreactor, utilising a range of agitation modes, to improve understanding of the impact of continuous and intermittent agitation upon an induced pluripotent stem cell to cardiomyocyte (iPSC-CM) cell culture process. The goal of this work was to investigate optimisation of stem cell differentiation yields through understanding of the cell culture envinronment from an engineering perspective.