Science: 3-D vaccines assembles to fight against cancer, deadly diseases and infectious diseases

          

 

National Institute of Biomedical
Imaging and Bioengineeringovel(NIBIB) funded have developed a 3D vaccine that could provide a more
effective way to harness the immune
system to fight cancer as well as infectious
diseases. The vaccine spontaneously assembles
into a scaffold once injected under the skin and is
capable of recruiting, housing, and manipulating
immune cells to generate a powerful immune
response.
The vaccine was recently found to be
effective in delaying tumor growth in mice.
"This vaccine is a wonderful example of applying
biomaterials to new questions and issues in
medicine," says David Mooney, Ph.D., a professor
of bioengineering at Harvard University in the
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences,
whose lab developed the vaccine. The project was
co-led by Jaeyun Kim, Ph.D. and Aileen Li, a
doctoral student in the Mooney lab. Their findings
were published in the December 8, 2014 issue of
Nature Biotechnology.
Cancer vaccines
Cancer cells are generally ignored by the immune
system. This is because -- for the most part --
they more closely resemble cells that belong in
the body than pathogens, such as bacterial cells
or viruses. The goal of cancer vaccines is to
provoke the immune system to recognize cancer
cells as foreign and attack them.
One way to do this is by manipulating dendritic
cells, the coordinators of immune system
behavior. Dendritic cells constantly patrol the
body, sampling bits of protein found on the
surface of cells or viruses called antigens. When a
dendritic cell comes in contact with an antigen
that it deems foreign, it carries it to the lymph
nodes, where it instructs the rest of the immune
system to attack anything in the body displaying
that antigen.
Though similar to healthy cells, cancer cells often
display unique antigens on their surface, which
can be exploited to develop cancer
immunotherapies. For example, in dendritic cell
therapy, white blood cells are removed from a
patient's blood, stimulated in the lab to turn into
dendritic cells, and then incubated with an
antigen that is specific to a patient's tumor,
along with other compounds to activate and
mature the dendritic cells. These "programmed"
cells are then injected back into the bloodstream
with the hopes that they will travel to the lymph
nodes and present the tumor antigen to the rest
of the immune system cells.

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