Darrell Irvine has figured out how to make treatments and vaccines more potent so they do a better job at safely triggering the immune system to fight diseases such as cancer and HIV.
His lab, for example, has engineered vaccines so the active ingredients “hitchhike” on a common protein in blood and tissue fluids, and are carried more effectively to the lymph nodes. The lymph nodes are where immune cells are activated and “all the action happens,” says Irvine, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research Institute
Elicio Therapeutics, a biotech firm Irvine cofounded, announced in August that a vaccine that utilizes this technology was correlated with a reduced risk of death or relapse in more than two-thirds of patients with pancreatic or colorectal cancer in an early-stage clinical trial. Irvine says the vaccine’s efficacy needs to be confirmed in a larger randomized clinical trial, which is ongoing. “In the not too distant future, we can imagine really engineering the immune response in a way that we haven’t been able to do before,” he says.