SHORT DESCRIPTION A cell-free method that assembles vaccines by integrating viral membrane proteins into liposomes, enabling rapid prototype production without cold chain requirements.
INVENTORS
NU Tech ID NU 2022-192
IP STATUS U.S. Patent Pending (19/120,101)
DEVELOPMENT STAGE
Target Validation
BACKGROUND Virus infection poses a recurring global health challenge. While vaccines are effective at protecting against virus threats, conventional vaccine modalities including inactivated or live‑attenuated viruses, recombinant protein subunits, and gene‑based platforms such as mRNA face important constraints, including long cell‑culture timelines, risk of reverting to pathogenic forms, suboptimal immunogenicity for membrane glycoproteins, and dependence on cold‑chain manufacturing and distribution that is difficult to maintain in resource‑limited, outbreak‑prone regions. There is a critical unmet need for plug‑and‑play vaccine technologies that can rapidly generate stable, immunogenic viral mimetics for priority pathogens while reducing risks, lowering costs, and simplifying distribution by enabling decentralized, cold‑chain‑independent deployment.
ABSTRACT This invention by Northwestern researchers describes a cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) approach to manufacture protein‑conjugated nanocarrier vaccines against viral diseases. Addition of liposomes, polymersomes, or lipid nanoparticles and nucleic acid templates encoding engineered viral proteins to the CFPS system enables the otherwise challenging cell-free synthesis of viral membrane proteins by providing a scaffold for translational expression and protein folding, which results in the one-step assembly of lipid nanoparticles displaying viral membrane proteins. By tuning lipid composition and incorporating lipid adjuvants such as MPLA, the inventors identify “design rules” that enhance correct insertion, orientation, and conformational epitope display of viral proteins, as confirmed by western blot, conformational antibody binding, and neutralization assays. The platform also supports tagged viral fusion proteins that conjugate to benzylguanine‑ or HaloTag‑modified lipids, enabling modular, protein‑tag‑mediated decoration of nanocarriers and co‑loading of additional cargos. Together, these approaches enable one‑step assembly of viral‑mimetic nanoparticles that are compatible with multivalent viral protein expression, elicit specific neutralizing antibody responses in vivo, and bypass the need for cold chain manufacturing and storage, representing a rapid and easy method of vaccine development.
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PUBLICATIONS
KEYWORDS Cell-free protein synthesis, liposome integration, viral membrane proteins, vaccine assembly, viral mimetic, multivalent vaccine, rapid prototyping, therapeutics