One shot of new bacterial exosome-based vaccine could do the trick
The DeLisa and Putnam labs have teamed up for nearly a decade to develop novel vaccines based on bacterial outer membrane vesicles (OMVs), which are a membrane-based nanostructure, in this case engineered from nonpathogenic E. coli, whose outer surface mimics the cell from which it originated. Recently, the Putnam-DeLisa team, along with collaborator Gary Whittaker from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Cornell, leveraged the versatility of OMVs, which have shown promise against other deadly pathogens, to create a single-shot vaccine. Their paper, “A Single Dose and Long-Lasting Vaccine Against Pandemic Influenza Through the Controlled Release of a Heterospecies Tandem M2 Sequence Embedded Within Detoxified Bacterial Outer Membrane Vesicles,” appears in the journal Vaccine. First author is Hannah Watkins, Ph.D. ’17, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A story featuring this work also appeared in the Cornell Chronicle on September 21, 2017. Links to the paper and the Chronicle article, entitled "A new kind of influenza vaccine: One shot might do the trick" can be found below.