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Vaccines prevent millions of deaths a year and have pushed some diseases to the edge of existence. Yet it’s proven highly challenging, if not impossible, to develop effective vaccines against a number of viruses.
Despite decades of research, there’s no approved vaccine that offers long-term protection against influenza, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), or respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a widespread pathogen that causes respiratory tract infections. For RSV, for instance, high-risk infants receive monthly injections of synthetically produced antibodies to protect them in the short term.
In recent years, several groups of researchers have explored a different approach: Taking the immune system’s own antibody-generating B cells and using CRISPR to engineer them to express antibodies against these hard-to-treat viruses—in bulk and on demand in the event of an infection.
The latest group to do so has successfully modified human and mouse B cells to express antibodies targeting ...
