Via UW Medicine:
International researchers have computer-designed a nanoparticle vaccine candidate for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), an infection caught by nearly all children under three, which is the leading cause of pneumonia in babies under a year old in the U.S. Computationally-designed protein nanoparticles enable significantly greater control over key vaccine properties, including overall size, stability, and the number of antigens presented to the immune system. University of Washington (UW) researchers said the vaccine based on the DS-Cav1 protein yielded 10 times more potency than DS-Cav1 alone. UW's Neil King said, "We believe that computationally-designed nanoparticle vaccines will ultimately be simpler to manufacture and more effective than traditional vaccines. We will continue to develop this technology so that we and others can make new vaccines better, cheaper, and faster."