Darrell J. Irvine, Ph.D.

An MIT research team led by Professor Darrell Irvine has developed a novel kind of vaccine adjuvant: a nanoparticle that can help to stimulate the immune system to generate a stronger response to a vaccine. These nanoparticles contain saponin, a compound derived from the bark of the Chilean soapbark tree, along with a molecule called MPLA, each of which helps to activate the immune system.

The adjuvant has been incorporated into an experimental HIV vaccine that has shown promising results in animal studies, and this month, the first human volunteers will receive the vaccine as part of a phase 1 clinical trial run by the Consortium for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development at the Scripps Research Institute. MIT News spoke with Irvine about why this project required an interdisciplinary approach, and what may lie ahead… Continue reading.

The National Academy of Medicine announced the election of 100 new members to join their esteemed ranks in 2023, among them five MIT faculty members and seven additional affiliates.

MIT professors Daniel Anderson, Regina Barzilay, Guoping Feng, Darrell Irvine, and Morgen Shen were among the new members. Justin Hanes PhD ’96, Said Ibrahim MBA ’16, and Jennifer West ’92, along with three former students in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST) — Michael Chiang, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Robert Vonderheide — were also elected, as was Yi Zhang, an associate member of The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service, the academy noted in announcing the election of its new members… Continue reading.

The study will enroll an estimated 1,000 patients, of whom approximately 200 will have vitiligo. The remaining participants will be at-risk family members, some 40 to 60 of whom are expected to develop vitiligo during the 5-year study.

A new $3.75 million clinical trial, led by John E. Harris, MD, PhD, Manuel Garber, PhD, and Mehdi Rashighi, MD, at University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, will investigate factors that may predispose individuals to vitiligo.

“Vitiligo is influenced by our genes, but further understanding the interplay of genetics, environmental and other biological factors such as RNA and protein biomarkers is critical to identifying disease preclinically,” said Harris in a university press release. “If we can isolate subclinical signatures of disease, we can potentially predict which patients are at the greatest risk of developing vitiligo and develop new treatments for the disease… Continue reading.

In a new study, immunostimulatory drugs slowed tumor growth without producing systemic inflammation.

Cancer drugs that stimulate the body’s immune system to attack tumors are a promising way to treat many types of cancer. However, some of these drugs produce too much systemic inflammation when delivered intravenously, making them harmful to use in patients.

MIT researchers have now come up with a possible way to get around that obstacle. In a new study, they showed that when immunostimulatory prodrugs — inactive drugs that require activation in the body — are tuned for optimal activation timing, the drugs provoke the immune system to attack tumors without the side effects that occur when the active form of the drug is given… Continue reading.

Stimulating the body’s immune system to attack tumors is a promising way to treat cancer. Scientists are working on two complementary strategies to achieve that: taking off the brakes that tumors put on the immune system; and “stepping on the gas,” or delivering molecules that jumpstart immune cells.

However, when jumpstarting the immune system, researchers have to be careful not to overstimulate it, which can cause severe and potentially fatal side effects. A team of MIT researchers has now developed a new way to deliver a stimulatory molecule called IL-12 directly to tumors, avoiding the toxic effects that can occur when immunostimulatory drugs are given throughout the body… Continue reading.

Immunotherapy is a promising strategy to treat cancer by stimulating the body’s own immune system to destroy tumor cells, but it only works for a handful of cancers. MIT researchers have now discovered a new way to jump-start the immune system to attack tumors, which they hope could allow immunotherapy to be used against more types of cancer.

Their novel approach involves removing tumor cells from the body, treating them with chemotherapy drugs, and then placing them back in the tumor. When delivered along with drugs that activate T cells, these injured cancer cells appear to act as a distress signal that spurs the T cells into action… Continue reading.

Delivering vaccines directly to the lungs can boost immune responses to respiratory infections or lung cancer, study finds.

Many viruses infect their hosts through mucosal surfaces such as the lining of the respiratory tract. MIT researchers have now developed a vaccination strategy that can create an army of T cells that are ready and waiting at those surfaces, offering a quicker response to viral invaders.

The researchers showed that they could induce a strong memory T cell response in the lungs of mice by giving them a vaccine modified to bind to a protein naturally present in mucus. This can help ferry the vaccine across mucosal barriers, such as the lining of the lungs… Continue reading.

By using a technique known as DNA origami to fold DNA into a virus-like structure, MIT researchers have designed HIV-like particles coated with HIV antigens in precise patterns, which may eventually be used as an HIV vaccine. In vitro studies showed that the DNA origami particles, which mimic the size and shape of viruses, provoked a strong immune response from human immune cells. The researchers anticipate that the same approach could be used to design DNA origami vaccines for a wide variety of viral diseases, and they are now working on adapting the technology to develop a potential vaccine for SARS-CoV-2.

“The rough design rules that are starting to come out of this work should be generically applicable across disease antigens and diseases,” said Darrell Irvine, PhD, who is the Underwood-Prescott professor with appointments in the departments of biological engineering and materials science and engineering; an associate director of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; and a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. “Our platform technology allows you to easily swap out different subunit antigens and peptides from different types of viruses to test whether they may potentially be functional as vaccines,” added Mark Bathe, PhD, an MIT professor of biological engineering and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard… Continue reading.

A promising new way to treat some types of cancer is to program the patient’s own T cells to destroy the cancerous cells. This approach, termed CAR-T cell therapy, is now used to combat some types of leukemia, but so far it has not worked well against solid tumors such as lung or breast tumors.

MIT researchers have now devised a way to super-charge this therapy so that it could be used as a weapon against nearly any type of cancer. The research team developed a vaccine that dramatically boosts the antitumor T cell population and allows the cells to vigorously invade solid tumors… Continue reading.

Programming the body’s immune system to attack cancer cells has had promising results for treating blood cancers such as lymphoma and leukemia. This tactic has proven more challenging for solid tumors such as breast or lung cancers, but MIT researchers have now devised a novel way to boost the immune response against solid tumors.

By developing nanoparticle “backpacks” that hold immune-stimulating drugs, and attaching them directly to T cells, the MIT engineers showed in a study of mice that they could enhance those T cells’ activity without harmful side effects. In more than half of the treated animals, tumors disappeared completely.

“We found you could greatly improve the efficacy of the T cell therapy with backpacked drugs that help the donor T cells survive and function more effectively. Even more importantly, we achieved that without any of the toxicity that you see with systemic injection of the drugs,” says Darrell Irvine, a professor of biological engineering and of materials science and engineering, an associate director of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and the senior author of the study… Continue reading.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) has announced the pending induction of Darrell J. Irvine, Ph.D., Professor of Biological Engineering and Materials Science, Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to its College of Fellows. Dr. Irvine was nominated, reviewed, and elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows For outstanding contributions to immune engineering, through a marriage of immunobiology-driven science with the tools and techniques of bioengineering.