Hitchhiking vaccines boost immunity
Many vaccines, including those for influenza, polio, and measles, consist of a killed or disabled version of a virus. However, for certain diseases, this type of vaccine is ineffective, or just too risky.An alternative, safer approach is a vaccine made of small fragments of proteins produced by a disease-causing virus or bacterium. This has worked for some diseases, but in many cases these vaccines don’t provoke a strong enough response.Now a team of engineers at MIT has developed a new way to deliver such vaccines directly to the lymph nodes, where huge populations of immune cells reside: These vaccines hitch a ride to the lymph nodes by latching on to the protein albumin, found in the bloodstream. In tests with mice, such vaccines produced very strong immune responses, the researchers report in the Feb. 16 online edition of Nature.“The lymph nodes are where all the action happens in a primary...