New vaccine platform could ease development, delivery of virus-fighters

To many, EV stands for “electric vehicle.” To researchers at Harvard University and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, it’s shorthand for another vehicle — this one nanoscopic — that might help streamline the development and delivery of vaccines worldwide. By repurposing one of the human body’s natural cargo transports, a Harvard-Nebraska team has developed a vaccine platform that could curb certain engineering challenges, storage demands and side effects of vaccines that combat HIV epidemics and the COVID-19 pandemic. The team’s platform also showed promise in early trials with mice, ramping up antibody production when pitted against HIV and improving survival rates in the face of influenza. “We believe that this delivery system can enhance the immune response, particularly by inducing antibodies against viral infection,” said Shi-Hua Xiang, associate professor of veterinary medicine and biomedical sciences at Nebraska. Historically, vaccines have consisted of weakened or inactivated viruses that are recognized by the human immune system,...