Delivering the vaccination mail

The impact of preventative and therapeutic vaccines continues to expand in the fields of infectious disease and cancer, but their full potential is currently limited by drug-delivery challenges. Synthetic delivery systems that incorporate principles of biological design could improve vaccine efficacy significantly. A recent paper by Murthy et al. demonstrates that microgels engineered on the nano-scale and designed to degrade at the mildly acidic pH of the phagosomal compartment can enhance protein-antigen entry into the cytoplasmic major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class 1 processing pathway.