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What a travel nurse should know about 3-D vaccines

3-D vaccines might be able to treat and prevent cancer.

Among the most exciting and promising new developments in the medical travel nursing community is the 3-D vaccine, billed as the next-generation form of treatment that may eventually be on the front lines of cancer treatment and prevention.

What is a 3-D vaccine?
3-D vaccines are a programmable biomaterial that assembles itself into a disease-fighting structure once injected via a needle into the body. Researchers explain that the vaccine is a type of immunotherapy, in which the biomaterial released in the bloodstream to prevent and treat cancer and other diseases by stimulating the body's immune response.

"We can create 3-D structures using minimally-invasive delivery to enrich and activate a host's immune cells to target and attack harmful cells in vivo," Dr. David Mooney, the Robert P. Pinkas Professor of Bioengineering at Harvard SEAS, said in a press release.

The rod-like structure, made from silica known as mesoporous silica rods (MSRs), spontaneously constructs itself at the vaccination site to create a three-dimensional scaffold. In the scaffold lie thousands of nooks and crannies where dendritic cells are housed. Dendritic cells are considered the body's "surveillance system," and when they spot something harmful, the cells set off the alarm for immune responses.

With this up-and-coming style of treatment, Mooney suggests this mechanism could battle and even prevent cancer as well as infectious disease such as HIV. 

What cancer does to the immune system
Those on travel nursing assignments may know that when cancer attacks the body, one's immune response has an extremely hard time defeating the disease on its own. That's because while the immune system normally flags germs, colds, influenza and other infections as foreign invaders, cancerous cells are much harder to identify. As the American Cancer Society explains, cancer cells are not so much like enemy soldiers of an invading army as much as traitors within one's own army.

To lend support to the immune system, activated dendritic cells disperse from the vaccine scaffold and alert the immune responses to attack dangerous cells such as cancerous cells. Later, the MSRs biodedgrade within a few months. 

"Although right now we are focusing on developing a cancer vaccine, in the future we could be able to manipulate which type of dendritic cells or other types of immune cells are recruited to the 3-D scaffold by using different kinds of cytokines released from the MSRs," co-lead author Aileen Li, a graduate student pursuing her Ph.D. in bioengineering at Harvard SEAS, said in the press release.

Tons of potential
Stanford researchers have found antigen-producing cells have been effective in treating patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. But they suggest the potential extends far beyond that. Since the vaccines are relatively easy to make and can be manufactured rapidly, they might be available to confront an emerging infectious disease as well as long-standing chronic disease