(553c) Leveraging Biomaterial Stability and Retention in Lymph Nodes to Control Immunity

Lymph nodes are key tissues that coordinate immune function. In this talk I will present some of the new ways we are using engineered materials to study the local microenvironment of lymph nodes to inform design of vaccines and immunotherapies. Many common biomaterials exhibit intrinsic physiochemical features that activate, suppress, or modulate immune pathways, even in the absence of other immune signals. In this area, I will discuss our work to characterize how these immunological interactions change as common polymeric vaccine carriers degrade in immune cells and in lymph nodes. Understanding how the immunological profile of biomaterials evolves during delivery could enable more rational design of new vaccines and immunotherapies. In a second area, I will discuss our work to understand how the local concentrations of drugs in lymph nodes impacts the development of immune cells expanding and differentiation in these sites. In particular, our data reveal that different types of T cell responses – effector, memory, regulatory – can be produced against the same antigen by locally altering metabolism in lymph nodes during T cell expansion. As translational examples, I will discuss our work to exploit this idea using immune-modulatory small molecules to enhance responses for cancer vaccination, or conversely, to combat autoimmunity by regulating T cell function.