‘The field is at a flash­point’: New Chad Mirkin-found­ed biotech hopes to make more ef­fec­tive can­cer vac­cines

Fol­low­ing the suc­cess of the mR­NA Covid vac­cines, can­cer vac­cines are see­ing re­newed in­ter­est af­ter years of mid­dling re­sults. But a group of re­searchers sug­gests that more at­ten­tion needs to be paid not to what goes in­to those vac­cines, but how the parts are put to­geth­er.

In a re­cent pa­per pub­lished in Na­ture Bio­med­ical En­gi­neer­ing, re­searchers led by North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty’s Chad Mirkin de­scribe how the place­ment of dif­fer­ent anti­gens in a can­cer vac­cine im­pacts its ef­fi­ca­cy. The pa­per builds on past work done by Mirkin’s lab that sug­gests the struc­ture, or how the parts of a vac­cine are arranged, im­pact a vac­cine’s ef­fi­ca­cy, not just its com­po­nents.

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