Vaccine strategy could aid in COVID-19 immunization
To confront the many challenges that infectious diseases pose to mankind head-on, a multi-disciplinary team of bioengineers, materials-scientists and immunologists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute has developed a broadly deployable biomaterials-based infection vaccine technology called “OMNIVAX.” OMNIVAX was inspired by a fundamentally new cancer vaccine approach created by David Mooney’s group in the immuno-materials platform that he leads at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Mooney is a Wyss core faculty member and the Robert P. Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The vaccine platform approach is rooted in the idea that antigens, when they are incorporated together with immune-activating adjuvants in a longer-lived biomaterial scaffold that concentrates immune cells at the site of vaccination, can be presented to the immune system in a more controlled and sustained way than when merely provided transiently in soluble form. As a result...