The laboratory of Quan Lu at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has developed an innovative vaccine platform that features a novel antigen display technology that has been shown to elicit broadly neutralizing antibody responses from peptide sequences that alone are immune-silent. The team is currently exploring the use of this platform as a candidate for a COVID-19 vaccine and hopes to collaborate with industrial partners to accelerate its development.

The technology was discovered by the Lu Lab while investigating systems and constructs to produce extracellular microvesicles. The team observed that conjugating various peptides to specific transmembrane protein constructs increased budding of extracellular vesicles displaying the protein, and that antigens displayed in this way generated surprisingly robust immune responses in two models of infectious disease.