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Attivare Therapeutics, a startup founded by researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, received a license from Harvard to use biomaterials developed at the Wyss Institute to create treatments for tumors that do not respond to existing immunotherapies.

The new biomaterials — which consist of silica rods and signaling molecules that could be injected into patients to induce an immune response — were invented by Harvard Bioengineering professor David J. Mooney and scientists from the Wyss Institute, Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Robert H. Pierce, Attivare’s chief scientific officer, said the silica rods could allow scientists to develop an “off the shelf cancer vaccine” that would be personalized to the characteristics of a specific tumor and injected into patients.

The rods act as an adjuvant — a danger signal for the immune system. When combined with the antigens on the surface of tumor cells, they teach immune cells to target the tumor. Because the rods can be combined with many different antigens and additional adjuvants, Attivare hopes they can help produce many customizable treatments.

“It’s like Lego blocks,” Pierce said. “It’s very modular.”

Jessica C. McDonough, Attivare’s co-founder and vice president, said that while many current immunotherapies attempt to inject as many immune agonists — danger signals that bind to the cancer cells — as a patient can tolerate, the rods teach the immune system to recognize the signals already present on the tumor as dangerous.

“It really flips drug design on its head,” she said.

Attivare hopes for a personalized antigen approach to become a “standard of care for cancer patients,” McDonough said, but the company is still waiting to design and conduct clinical trials.

The process of conducting trials and going through regulatory reviews “could be quite lengthy”, she added.

The rods are riddled with tiny holes — “like Swiss cheese,” Pierce said. The holes give them a massive surface area, allowing them to stick to antigens and adjuvants.

The rods are biodegradable, dissolving within 21 days after they are injected, according to McDonough. Pierce said that timeline lets them last longer than other vaccines, increasing their exposure to the immune system.

“We think that’s going to be very beneficial in terms of increasing the efficacy of vaccine delivery,” he said.

Harvard Medical School professor Iannis E. Adamopoulos, who studies cellular interactions of the skeletal and immune systems and was not involved in the study, wrote in an email that the new technology could also help combat autoimmune diseases by suppressing undesirable immune responses.

Like other immunotherapies, Adamopoulos wrote, treatments developed using the new technology will have to strike a balance between inhibiting and activating immune responses. Overactivation could lead patients to develop autoimmunity, while long-term suppression could increase infection risk.

But, according to Adamopoulos, the new technologies are “highly programmable,” making it easier for scientists to address those concerns.

Correction: December 14, 2024

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Attivare received a license from the Wyss Institute to use the biomaterials it engineered to develop tumor treatments. In fact, Attivare received the license from Harvard.