3D Vaccines Pave the Way for Supercharged Immune Systems.

Vaccines are responsible for preventing millions upon millions of deaths each year through the immunity they grant us to otherwise life threatening diseases. Their efficacy and safety is undisputed (at least from a scientific perspective anyway, which is the only way that matters honestly) and this mostly comes from the fact that they use our own immune system as the mechanism of action. A typical vaccine uses part of the virus to trigger the immune system to produce the right antibodies without having to endure the potentially deadly symptoms that the virus can cause. This response is powerful enough to provide immunity from those diseases and so researchers have long looked for ways of harnessing the body’s natural defenses against other, more troubling conditions and a recent development could see vaccines used to treat a whole host of things that you wouldn’t think would be possible.

Conditions that are currently considered terminal, like cancer, often stem from the body lacking the ability to mount a defensive response. For cancer this is because the cells themselves look the same as normal healthy cells, despite their nature to reproduce in an uncontrolled fashion, which means that the immune system ignores them. These cells do have signatures that we can detect however and we can actually program people’s immune systems to register those cells as foreign, triggering an immune response. However this treatment (which relies on extracting the patient’s white blood cells,  turning them into dendritic cells and programming them with the tumour’s antigens) is expensive and of limited on-going effectiveness. However the new treatment devised by researchers at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering uses a novel method which drastically increases this treatment’s effectiveness and duration.

The vaccine they’ve created uses 3D nano structures which, when injected into a patient, form a sort of microscopic haystack (pictured above). These structures can be loaded with all sorts of compounds however in this particular experiment they loaded them with the antigens found on a specific type of cancer cells. Once these rods have been injected they then capture within them the dendritic cells that are responsible for triggering an immune response. The dendritic cells are then programmed with the cancer antigens and, when released, trigger a body wide immune response. The treatment was highly effective in a mouse model with a 90% survival rate for animals who would have otherwise died at 25 days.

The potential for this is quite staggering as it provides us another avenue to elicit an immune response, one that appears to be far less invasive and more effective than current alternatives provide. Of course such treatments are still like years away from seeing clinical trials but with such promising results in the mouse model I’m sure it will happen eventually. What will be interesting to see is if this method of delivery can be used to deliver traditional vaccines as well, potentially paving the way for more vaccines to be administered in a single dose. I know that it seems like every other week we come up with another cure for cancer but this one seems to have some real promise behind it and I can’t wait to see how it performs in us humans.