Can you give me a ride to the lymph node?
An effective way of delivering vaccines to lymph nodes has been developed
ABC Magazine based on MIT materials: Hitchhiking vaccines boost immunityAmerican researchers have developed a new way to deliver subunit vaccines directly to the lymph nodes.
In animal experiments, this technique dramatically increased the effectiveness of immunopreparations.
Vaccinations against certain diseases are weakened or killed whole microorganisms. However, for others, such an approach is ineffective or unsafe. An alternative is subunit vaccines containing immunogenic fragments of cell molecules. This type of drugs works much better when delivered directly to the lymph nodes, where the primary immune response is formed.
Attempts have been made to "direct" the injected vaccine into the lymph nodes by loading it with transport nanoparticles or labeling them with antibodies specific to immune cells. However, the effectiveness of such approaches was unsatisfactory.
The development of the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is based on a technique already used for the targeted delivery of radiopaque dyes to lymph nodes in the diagnosis of cancer metastases. It consists in binding the desired molecule to albumin proteins, which in this state are actively captured by lymph nodes.
Since albumins bind well to fat-soluble molecules, researchers supplemented experimental vaccines against HIV, melanoma and cervical cancer with lipophilic "tails", after which they "attached" them to a transport protein.
The lymph node into which the green-colored vaccine particles penetrate,
and a schematic representation of such a particle is VM.
In an experiment on mice, such vaccines caused a 5-10 times stronger immune response than simple subunit drugs, leading to the appearance of a large population of T-lymphocytes specific to a given antigen. Clinically, this was manifested by the fact that vaccination against melanoma slowed down its growth, and from cervical cancer – reduced the volume of the tumor.
When adding a CpG adjuvant – a substance that enhances the immune response to the vaccine – the experimental technique increased the effectiveness and safety of its use, said Darrell Irvine, the head of the study.
Article by Liu et al. Structure-based programming of lymph-node targeting in molecular vaccines is published in the journal Nature.
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