This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A nanoscale particle with a unique structure, developed at MIT, holds potential as a customizable delivery vehicle for personalized cancer vaccines. The backbone of the vaccine is a modified, harmless bacteriophage called M13, which forms a nanofiber that can be coated with cancer antigens.
By precisely controlling the density of those cancer proteins, the researchers found that they could create a vaccine that prevents the development of colon tumors in mice. This type of delivery particle could be adapted to carry many different antigens, allowing for the creation of personalized vaccines to treat individual patients' tumors, the researchers say. "The great thing about this is that it's modular and we could switch out different antigens on demand, so you could design it to be patient-specific and target a known antigen for a particular kind of cancer," says Angela Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering and a member of the Koch Institute.
Belcher is the senior author of the study, which appears in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials. Shengnan Huang, a research scientist at the Koch Institute, is the paper's lead author. Jack Rudrum, Huaiyao Peng and Hao Nghi Luu, graduate students at the Koch Institute, are also authors of the paper.
For more than 20 years, Belcher's lab has been deploying the M13 bacteriophage in a variety of applications. This virus, which is harmless to humans, consists of a single strand of DNA coated in a protein shell, or capsid. Belcher has previously developed techniques for generating materials by engineering these viruses to self-assemble into nanoscale scaffolds.
By coating these scaffolds with inorganic materials, they can create functional devices such as batteries, semiconductors, solar cells and catalysts, with precise control over the electronic, optical and magnetic properties of the materials. More recently, Belcher's lab has been developing methods to control features of the phage that could allow it to be repurposed for medical applications, including vaccine delivery. "We're taking this toolkit that we've worked on and developed over decades and formatting it to be specific for vaccine therapeutics," Belcher says.
"Some of the lessons learned from making batteries and all these other things are now being fine-tuned to make personalized vaccines." The capsid that surrounds the M13 phage forms a long filament made from viral proteins. To create vaccines, the researchers modify one of these proteins, known as pVIII, by attaching an antigen to the end of the protein. This can be done by adding the gene for the antigen to the virus's DNA.
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