Irvine and MIT professor J. Christopher Love, the senior authors of a paper on the work, had found that the combination helped generate more robust immune responses. In the new paper, they showed that the dual-adjuvant vaccine accumulated in the lymph nodes, where white blood cells known as B cells encounter antigens and undergo rapid mutations that generate new antibodies. The vaccine’s antigens remained there for up to a month, allowing the immune system to build up a much greater number and diversity of antibodies against the HIV protein than the vaccine given alone or with one adjuvant.
“When you think about the immune system sampling all of the possible solutions, the more chances we give it to identify an effective solution, the better,” Love says.
This approach may mimic what occurs during a natural infection and could lead to an immune response so strong and broad that vaccines only need to be given once. Love says, “It offers the opportunity to engineer new formulations for these types of vaccines across a wide range of different diseases, such as influenza, SARS-CoV-2, or other pandemic outbreaks.”