Caitlyn Stulpin , 2025-05-14 16:58:00
Key takeaways:
- Immunoengineering has previously been beneficial for treating cancers.
- This concept could also benefit the ID field in terms of antimicrobial resistance and infections among immunocompromised patients.
Immunoengineering, which has been beneficial to other medical specialties, could be used in the infectious diseases field to help treat a variety of potentially deadly infections by boosting patient immunity, researchers said.
“Immunoengineering, the application of engineering principles to design immunotherapies, is revolutionizing cancer care,” Alexander M. Tatara, MD, PhD, and colleagues wrote in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.
They explained that immunoengineering breakthroughs such as chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy and antibody engineering have improved survival for patients with cancers that would have otherwise been resistant to treatment.
Despite cancer having so far driven early discoveries in immunoengineering, the researchers wrote that the infectious diseases (ID) field stands to “benefit tremendously” by applying immunoengineering concepts to current clinical challenges such as antimicrobial resistance and infections in immunocompromised patients.
We spoke with Tatara, an assistant professor in the department of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, about what immunoengineering is and how it has been and can be used in ID.
Healio: What is immunoengineering?
Tatara: Immunoengineering is the interdisciplinary area of applying engineering strategies and precision to modulate the immune response. As we have a better fundamental of immunologic processes and a greater variety of engineering tools, we can design more sophisticated therapies to leverage our innate and adaptive immune cells against infection.
Healio: How has it been explored previously?
Tatara: Immunoengineering strategies have greatly benefited the field of cancer. For example, monoclonal antibodies have been engineered as checkpoint inhibitors to treat —and even cure — types of cancer that are otherwise lethal.
Healio: How could this be applied to ID or how is it being applied to ID?
Tatara: Engineering strategies have benefited immunotherapy in ID in the past. For example, biomaterials scientists discovered ways to add polymer motifs to cytokine therapies to treat hepatitis C virus. In a recent example, the lipid nanoparticles used for the COVID-19 vaccine have a long history of immunoengineering research in their development that allowed for optimal cargo delivery.
Healio: What other areas of ID could benefit from immunoengineering?
Tatara: Immunoengineering has a few key benefits compared with conventional antibiotic or antiviral therapy. For example, by harnessing someone’s immune system, we avoid some of the toxicities of drug-based treatment. It also allows for immune memory formation so that a person may not require repeated “doses” of an immunotherapy. Lastly, immune cells have many different mechanisms they can use to inhibit a microbe or virus, whereas many conventional drugs only use a single mechanism. For these reasons, there are a variety of infections which could benefit from an immunoengineering approach to boost host immunity against a specific microorganism or virus.
Healio: What is the clinical takeaway of this paper?
Tatara: While some of the terminology surrounding immunoengineering may be new to clinicians, there is a rich history of designing strategies to improve host immunity against infection. By using novel engineering techniques, we can be more elegant in how we deliver immunotherapy in the infection space to help treat and prevent disease in our patients.
Reference:
For more information:
Alexander M. Tatara, MD, PhD, can be reached at Alexander.Tatara@UTSouthwestern.edu.
