Biomaterial-Based Vaccine Developed

A multi-disciplinary team of researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School for Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a biomaterial-based infection vaccine (ciVAX). Their findings were published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. 

The vaccines combine two technologies that are currently in clinical development for other applications, and that together enable the capture of immunogenic antigens from a broad spectrum of pathogens and their incorporation into immune cell-recruiting biomaterial scaffolds. Injected or implanted under the skin, ciVAX vaccines then reprogram the immune system to take action against pathogens.

In their study, the researchers successfully tested ciVAX technology as a protective measure against the most common causes of sepsis, including S. aureus and E. coli strains. Highlighting the technology's potential, they found that a prophylactic ciVAX vaccine, protected all vaccinated mice against a lethal attack with an antibiotic-resistant E. coli strain, while only 9% of unvaccinated control animals survived. In a pig model of septic shock induced by a different human E. coli isolate, a ciVAX vaccine prevented the development of sepsis in all four animals, while four unvaccinated animals developed severe and sudden sepsis within 12 hours. Finally, using an approach that mimicked a ring vaccination protocol in human or animal populations, a CiVax vaccine, when loaded with pathogen-derived material isolated from animals infected with one lethal E.coli strain, was able to cross-protect animals against a different lethal E. coli strain.

"Our method captures the majority of glycoprotein (and glycolipid) antigens from the pathogens, and presents these in their native form to the immune system, giving us access to a much larger spectrum of potential antigens than vaccines consisting of single or mixtures of recombinant antigens," said co-first author Michael Super.  "ciVAX vaccines against known pathogens can be fabricated and stored, but additionally, all components except the bacterial antigens can be pre-assembled from shelf-stable cGMP products. The complete vaccines can then be assembled in less than an hour once the antigens are available, which gives this technology unique advantages over other vaccine approaches when rapid responses are called for."