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harddriver
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https://www.science.org/content/article/engineers-transform-dental-floss-needle-free-vaccine
Flossing may be good for more than getting your dentist off your back—one day, it may also protect you from the flu. In an unorthodox approach to needle-free vaccines, researchers have developed a special kind of floss that can deliver proteins and inactive viruses to mice’s gumlines and trigger immune responses that protect against infectious disease, they report today in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
“I had honestly never thought of using floss as a vaccination strategy,” says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who was not involved in the work. “The results are quite impressive.”
For many years, scientists have tried to develop alternatives to delivering vaccines via syringes by turning to the moist areas in your mouth and nose where most viruses enter. But it’s tough to develop an effective vaccine that can be administered through those entry points because they have naturally tough defenses against foreign molecules, says Vanderbilt University immunologist James Crowe, who was not involved in the work.
The new approach could circumvent these defenses. Years ago, Harvinder Gill, an engineer at North Carolina State University who specializes in nanomedicine, was reading about gum disease when he stumbled across a paper that said the gingival sulcus—the pockets of gum between the sides of your teeth—could absorb molecules extremely well. “That sort of struck a spark,” says Gill, the new study’s senior author. “If it is highly permeable, could we not use it for vaccination?”
To test this idea, Gill and Rohan Ingrole, first author of the paper and a chemical engineer at Texas Tech University, had to do something no scientist had done before: Try to floss a mouse. It was a “quite difficult” two-person job, Gill says: One scientist gently pulled the mouse’s jaw down with the metal ring from a keychain while the other administered the floss.
During a test run, the team found that when researchers coated floss with a fluorescently labeled protein, 75% of the protein was successfully delivered to the mouse’s gums. And even 2 months after flossing, the mice had elevated levels of antibodies in their lungs, noses, feces, and spleens, suggesting a robust immune response to the protein.
Flossing may be good for more than getting your dentist off your back—one day, it may also protect you from the flu. In an unorthodox approach to needle-free vaccines, researchers have developed a special kind of floss that can deliver proteins and inactive viruses to mice’s gumlines and trigger immune responses that protect against infectious disease, they report today in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
“I had honestly never thought of using floss as a vaccination strategy,” says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who was not involved in the work. “The results are quite impressive.”
For many years, scientists have tried to develop alternatives to delivering vaccines via syringes by turning to the moist areas in your mouth and nose where most viruses enter. But it’s tough to develop an effective vaccine that can be administered through those entry points because they have naturally tough defenses against foreign molecules, says Vanderbilt University immunologist James Crowe, who was not involved in the work.
The new approach could circumvent these defenses. Years ago, Harvinder Gill, an engineer at North Carolina State University who specializes in nanomedicine, was reading about gum disease when he stumbled across a paper that said the gingival sulcus—the pockets of gum between the sides of your teeth—could absorb molecules extremely well. “That sort of struck a spark,” says Gill, the new study’s senior author. “If it is highly permeable, could we not use it for vaccination?”
To test this idea, Gill and Rohan Ingrole, first author of the paper and a chemical engineer at Texas Tech University, had to do something no scientist had done before: Try to floss a mouse. It was a “quite difficult” two-person job, Gill says: One scientist gently pulled the mouse’s jaw down with the metal ring from a keychain while the other administered the floss.
During a test run, the team found that when researchers coated floss with a fluorescently labeled protein, 75% of the protein was successfully delivered to the mouse’s gums. And even 2 months after flossing, the mice had elevated levels of antibodies in their lungs, noses, feces, and spleens, suggesting a robust immune response to the protein.
… so that’s the story about the infamous baked bean 