Over the last decade, scientists have had a renewed interest in vaccines due to improved technology and biological discovery. Vaccines were previously developed to preemptively treat patients before they got sick. Even today, vaccines are known to be a prophylactic treatment. However, others are using vaccines as a therapeutic approach. In this context researchers are working to bolster immune responses in patients with specific pathologies, such as cancer. Many vaccination regimens work to enhance T cell activity. T cells are cytotoxic immune cells that are responsible for the recognition and elimination of pathogens in the body. Vaccines can also work to drive antibody production.
Antibodies are elicited by the same adaptive immune response as T cells. However, specialized B cells known as plasma cells generate and release antibodies to neutralize infections and signal T cells to target foreign invaders. Researchers are currently working to develop vaccines that generate general antibodies that target pathogens broadly. This would expand the number of targets or strains that antibodies can identify and elicit strong immune response. What makes this research so critical is that broad vaccines have the ability to target viruses that commonly mutate to adapt and avoid immune detection.
A recent article in Science, by Darrell Irvine and others, demonstrated that a novel vaccine can generate specialized B cells, which can produce broad-targeting antibodies. This discovery could help lead to the development of a successful HIV vaccine. Irvine is Professor and Vice-Chair of the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the Scripps Institute in California. His work focuses on infectious diseases and cancer. Specifically, Irvine’s lab is dedicated to developing an effective HIV and cancer vaccine. He is world-renowned for his vaccine work and recognized for exceptional research.
Irvine and his team designed a vaccine platform that uses DNA instead of protein to act as a layered particle to display multiple copies of the molecule that would elicit immune detection. The vaccine generated more effective B cells that secreted antibodies and were shown to be effective in mice engineered to have similar immune systems to humans. Research in mice have shown that this new vaccine has more on-target effects compared to the current standard, which was already cited as a remarkable improvement. This new breakthrough could reshape how scientists and physicians think about immunotherapy and vaccine design in different contexts.
After analysis of results, scientists discovered that the DNA scaffold in the vaccine was able to hold many different molecules to activate a wide range of targets. Scientists were always unsure of whether the DNA scaffold would develop “on-target” B cells. This work has been part of ongoing research. The development of an HIV vaccine that would produce effective antibodies remained a challenge, until recently. This work is paradigm-shifting and provides an advancement in vaccine development. Moving forward, Irvine and the team would like to expand this treatment to the clinic. Although the results showing wide-range antibodies significantly improve HIV symptoms, scientists are still worried that B cell response can become hindered through neighboring off-target responses. Overall, the development of this new vaccine is a milestone in vaccine development and has the potential to significantly improve patient quality of life.
