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Engineers at MIT have developed an easily customizable vaccine that can be quickly manufactured and deployed in response to disease outbreaks, ScienceDaily reports.

The vaccine consists of strands of genetic material known as messenger RNA, which can be designed to code for any viral, bacterial, or parasitic protein. These molecules are then packaged into a molecule that delivers the RNA into cells, where it is translated into proteins that provoke an immune response from the host.

In addition to targeting infectious diseases, the researchers are using this approach to create cancer vaccines that would teach the immune system to recognize and destroy tumors.

"This nanoformulation approach allows us to make vaccines against new diseases in only seven days, allowing the potential to deal with sudden outbreaks or make rapid modifications and improvements," says Daniel Anderson, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering and a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).

The paper describing the new vaccines will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of July 4, 2016. The project was led by Jasdave Chahal, a postdoc at MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and Omar Khan, a postdoc at the Koch Institute.

Dendrimer-RNA nanoparticles generate protective immunity against lethal Ebola, H1N1 influenza, and Toxoplasma gondii challenges with a single dose (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1600299113)

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