Stanford team re-engineers virus to deliver therapies to cells

Stanford researchers have ripped the guts out of a virus and totally redesigned its core to repurpose its infectious capabilities into a safe vehicle for delivering vaccines and therapies directly where they are needed. The study reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences breathes new life into the field of targeted delivery, the ongoing effort to fashion treatments that affect diseased areas but leave healthy tissue alone. “We call this a smart particle,” said James Swartz, the professor of chemical engineering and of bioengineering at Stanford who led the study. “We make it smart by adding molecular tags that act like addresses to send the therapeutic payload where we want it to go.” Using the smart particle for immunotherapy would involve tagging its outer surface with molecules designed to teach the body’s disease-fighting cells to recognize and destroy cancers, Swartz said. For Swartz and his principal collaborator, Yuan Lu, now a pharmacology...