Engineers Design Customized Vaccines in One Week

Vaccines usually become available after the disease outbreak because of the long process of development and testing. Thus, engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Koch Institute developed an approach to make vaccines available in as fast as one week. 

The engineers used a nanoformulation approach to customize vaccines targeting not just infectious diseases but also cancer.  The team has already designed vaccines against Ebola, H1N1 influenza, and Toxoplasma gondii (a relative of the parasite that causes malaria), which were tested to be 100 percent effective in mice.

The vaccines developed by MIT and Koch Institute engineers contain strands of messenger RNA, which can be designed to code for any viral, bacterial, or parasitic protein. Then such molecules are packaged to be delivered into cells, where the RNA is translated into proteins that cause immune response from the host. Such vaccines are considered safer than DNA vaccines because RNA cannot be integrated into the host genome and cause mutations.

"This nanoformulation approach allows us to make vaccines against new diseases in only seven days, allowing the potential to deal with sudden outbreaks or make rapid modifications and improvements," said Daniel Anderson, an associate professor in MIT.

The principal authors, Omar Khan of Koch Institute and Jasdave Chahal of MIT, plan to open a company to license and commercialize the technology. They are also planning to develop vaccines against Zika virus and Lyme disease.