Programmable biomaterials could change the face of vaccines - Inducing immune response to fight disease

12/15/2014 - 00:00

  By Kat J. McAlpine -<br><br>One of the reasons cancer is so deadly is that it can evade attack from the body’s immune system, allowing tumors to flourish and spread. Using immunotherapy, scientists can try to induce the immune system to go into attack mode to fight cancer and to build long-lasting immune resistance to cancer cells. Now, researchers at the <a href="http://www.seas.harvard.edu/">Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences</a> (SEAS) and the <a href="http://wyss.harvard.edu/">Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering</a> at Harvard University have shown that a non-surgical injection of programmable biomaterial that spontaneously assembles in vivo into a 3D structure could fight and even help prevent cancer and infectious diseases such as HIV. Their findings are reported in Nature Biotechnology.<br><br><a href="https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2014/12/injectable-3d-vaccines-could-fight-cancer-and-infectious-diseases">READ MORE ON HARVARD | SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES</a><br><br>Ref: Injectable, spontaneously assembling, inorganic scaffolds modulate immune cells in vivo and increase vaccine efficacy.   

Jaeyun Kim,

Weiwei Aileen Li,

Youngjin Choi,

Sarah A Lewin,

Catia S Verbeke,

Glenn DranoffDavid J Mooney.  

Nature Biotechnology (2014) doi:10.1038/nbt.3071