MIT Researchers Design More Powerful mRNA Vaccine

A team of researchers at MIT today announced they are working on making mRNA vaccines produce a more robust immune response at a lower dose.

Published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering on September 7, 2023, this study showed how MIT researchers delivered COVID-19 antigen and the antigen to boost the immune response without needing a separate adjuvant.

The researchers’ tests also showed that the vaccine induced a strong immune response when delivered intranasally compared to the response elicited by traditional intramuscular vaccination.

In mice, intramuscular or intranasal administration of nanoparticles with the lead ionizable lipid and with mRNA encoding for the fusion protein (either the spike protein or the receptor-binding domain of SARS-CoV-2 increased the titres of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 tenfold with respect to the vaccine encoding for the unadjuvanted antigen.

“With intranasal vaccination, you might be able to kill Covid (SARS-CoV-2) at the mucus membrane before it gets into your body,” commented Daniel Anderson, a professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and the senior author of the study in an MIT News article.

“Intranasal vaccines may also be easier to administer to many people since they don’t require an injection.”

The researchers believe the effectiveness of other types of mRNA vaccines now in development, including vaccines for cancer, could be improved by incorporating similar immune-stimulating properties.

If further developed for use in humans, this type of mRNA vaccine could help to reduce costs, reduce the dosage needed, and potentially lead to longer-lasting immunity, wrote these researchers.

The National Institutes of Health and Translate Bio funded the research.