Abstract
Vaccines and cancer immunotherapies work by activating the immune system with biochemical signals. A new study shows that the immune system can also respond to physical cues such as the texture of injected nanoparticles, potentially opening up new ways to design therapies for cancer and other diseases. Many pathogens, including the flu virus, have spikelike features on their surface, and scientists have wondered whether their characteristic shapes have a role in triggering the immune system. To test whether physical cues could help activate an immune response, Mei X. Wu of Massachusetts General Hospital and Xi Xie of Sun Yat-Sen University designed an experiment that allowed them to isolate shape-based and biochemical cues. First, they made two sets of nanoparticles from titanium dioxide, a compound that doesn’t usually trigger the immune system. Some were spiky, some rough. They coated some of them with a lipid found on the surface of some
Published Version
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