Tag Archives: respiratory disease

Transforming respiratory disease prevention with a nasal vaccine

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This is exciting news but you might want to temper your enthusiasm, a little. The research was performed on mice. A November 10, 2025 Trinity College Dublin press release (also on EurekAlert) announces a new nasal vaccine,

A research team from Trinity has unveiled a groundbreaking new approach to vaccination that could redefine how we protect against respiratory infections.

In a landmark study published in Nature Microbiology, the team demonstrated that their nasally-delivered, antibiotic-inactivated Bordetella pertussis (AIBP) vaccine not only prevents severe disease but also curbs bacterial transmission — an achievement long sought by vaccine developers worldwide.

The work, led by Professor Kingston Mills and Dr Davoud Jazayeri of Trinity’s School of Biochemistry and Immunology, introduces a needle-free mucosal vaccine platform capable of inducing durable local immunity directly at the infection site.

This strategy could transform both whooping cough prevention and the broader market for respiratory bacterial vaccines, addressing an urgent global need for next-generation immunisation technologies.

“We’ve applied our understanding of protective immune pathways to engineer a fundamentally different kind of vaccine,” said Prof. Mills, who is based in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI). 

“By stimulating immunity where infections begin, at the respiratory mucosa, we can offer stronger protection and potentially interrupt community transmission.”

Current whooping cough vaccines, while life-saving, have key limitations: they protect infants from severe illness but fail to prevent bacterial colonisation in the nose and throat, allowing continued spread within communities. Global resurgence of pertussis — despite high vaccination coverage — underscores the commercial and clinical demand for improved vaccines.

The Trinity team’s innovation hinges on antibiotic-inactivated Bordetella pertussis delivered intranasally rather than by injection. This delivery route activates a distinct T-cell-driven mucosal immune response that shields both the lungs and upper respiratory tract without triggering unwanted systemic inflammation.

In preclinical studies, AIBP achieved complete protection against infection of the lungs and nasal cavity, which outperforms current acellular vaccines. These findings suggest AIBP could serve as both a stand-alone next-generation pertussis vaccine and a “plug-and-play” platform adaptable to other pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Mycoplasma pneumoniae and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

This research was initially funded through a Research Ireland Frontiers for the Future Award and is now advancing under the ARC Hub for Therapeutics, a  €32 million national translational research initiative administered by Research Ireland and co-funded by the Government of Ireland and the European Union through the ERDF Southern, Eastern & Midland Regional Programme 2021-2027.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Respiratory immunization using antibiotic-inactivated Bordetella pertussis confers T cell-mediated protection against nasal infection in mice by Seyed Davoud Jazayeri,, Lisa Borkner,, Caroline E. Sutton, and Kingston H. G. Mills. Nature Microbiology volume 10, pages 3094–3106 (2025) Published: 10 November 2025 Version of record: 10 November 2025 Issue date: December 2025 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-025-02166-6

This paper is open access.

Treating respiratory diseases (cystic fibrosis and lung cancer) with smart nanoparticles

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A June 12, 2025 news item on ScienceDaily announces research into specially designed nanoparticles that deliver genetic therapies straight to lung cells,

Scientists have made a key breakthrough for treating respiratory diseases by developing a new drug delivery system that transports genetic therapies directly to the lungs, opening promising possibilities for patients with conditions like lung cancer and cystic fibrosis.

The research, led by Gaurav Sahay of Oregon State University’s College of Pharmacy, was conducted in collaboration with Oregon Health & Science University and the University of Helsinki. Findings were published in a pair of papers, in Nature Communications and the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

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Caption: Scientists have made a key breakthrough for treating respiratory diseases by developing a new drug delivery system that transports genetic therapies directly to the lungs, opening promising possibilities for patients with conditions like lung cancer and cystic fibrosis. Illustration provided by Gaurav Sahay, OSU College of Pharmacy.

A June 5, 2025 Oregon State University (OSU) news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides a little more detail about the work, Note: Links have been removed,

Scientists created and tested more than 150 different materials and discovered a new type of nanoparticle that can safely and effectively carry messenger RNA and gene-editing tools to lung cells. In studies with mice, the treatment slowed the growth of lung cancer and helped improve lung function that had been limited by cystic fibrosis, a condition caused by one faulty gene.

Researchers also developed a chemical strategy to build a broad library of lung-targeting lipids used in the nanocarriers. These materials form the foundation for the new drug delivery system and could be customized to reach different organs in the body, Sahay said.

“The streamlined synthesis method makes it easier to design future therapies for a wide range of diseases,” he said. “These results demonstrate the power of targeted delivery for genetic medicines. We were able to both activate the immune system to fight cancer and restore function in a genetic lung disease, without harmful side effects.”

Oregon State’s K. Yu Vlasova, D.K. Sahel, Namratha Turuvekere Vittala Murthy, Milan Gautam and Antony Jozic were co-authors of the Nature Communications paper, which also included scientists from OHSU and the University of Helsinki. OSU’s Murthy, Jonas Renner, Milan Gautam, Emily Bodi and Antony Jozic teamed with Sahay on the other study.

“Our long-term goal is to create safer, more effective treatments by delivering the right genetic tools to the right place,” said Sahay. “This is a major step in that direction.”

These studies were funded by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the National Cancer Institute and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

I have links and citations for both papers, which I’m presenting in order of the first (Nature Communications) and last (Journal of the American Chemical Society) published,

Synthesis of ionizable lipopolymers using split-Ugi reaction for pulmonary delivery of various size RNAs and gene editing by K. Yu. Vlasova, A. Kerr, N. D. Pennock, A. Jozic, D. K. Sahel, M. Gautam, N. T. V. Murthy, A. Roberts, M. W. Ali, K. D. MacDonald, J. M. Walker, R. Luxenhofer & G. Sahay. Nature Communications volume 16, Article number: 4021 (2025) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-59136-z Published: 29 April 2025

This paper is open access.

Synthesis of Ionizable Lipids for Gene Delivery to the Lung Using an Ugi Four Component Reaction by Jonas Renner, Namratha Turuvekere Vittala Murthy, Milan Gautam, Emily Bodi, Antony Jozic, Gaurav Sahay. ournal of the American Chemical Society 2025, 147, 20, 17459–17467 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.5c04123 Published May 8, 2025 Copyright © 2025 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

University of Waterloo (Canada) team combines wearable tech with artificial intelligence (AI) for health

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A May 16, 2018 University of Waterloo news release (also on EurekAlert) trumpets the research,

A team of Waterloo researchers found that applying artificial intelligence to the right combination of data retrieved from wearable technology may detect whether your health is failing.

The study, which involved researchers from Waterloo’s Faculties of Applied Health Sciences and Engineering, found that the data from wearable sensors and artificial intelligence that assesses changes in aerobic responses could one day predict whether a person is experiencing the onset of a respiratory or cardiovascular disease.

“The onset of a lot of chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, has a direct impact on our aerobic fitness,” said Thomas Beltrame, who led the research while at the University of Waterloo, and is now at the Institute of Computing in University of Campinas in Brazil. “In the near future, we believe it will be possible to continuously check your health, even before you realize that you need medical help.”

The study monitored active, healthy men in their twenties who wore a shirt for four days that incorporated sensors for heart rate, breathing and acceleration. They then compared the readings with laboratory responses and found that it was possible to accurately predict health-related benchmarks during daily activities using only the smart shirt.

“The research found a way to process biological signals and generate a meaningful single number to track fitness,” said Richard Hughson, co-author and kinesiology professor at the Schlegel-University of Waterloo Research Institute for Aging.

Beltrame and Hughson co-authored the study with Alexander Wong, Canada Research Chair in artificial intelligence and medical imaging and an engineering professor at Waterloo. He is affiliated with both the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute and the Schlegel-University of Waterloo Research Institute for Aging. Robert Amelard, of the Schlegel-University of Waterloo Research Institute for Aging, is also a co-author. The study appears in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

“This multi-disciplinary research is a great example of how artificial intelligence can be a potential game-changer for healthcare by turning data into predictive knowledge to help healthcare professionals better understand an individual’s health,” said Wong. “It can have a significant impact on improving quality of life and well-being.”

Carré Technologies developed the smart shirts, called Hexoskin, used in the research.

The team plans to test these systems on mixed ages and genders, and people with health issues to see how people might wear the sensors to gauge whether their health is failing.

I wonder if this is the 2nd try for publicity about this work. Take a look at the publication date,

Extracting aerobic system dynamics during unsupervised activities of daily living using wearable sensor machine learning models by Thomas Beltrame, Robert Amelard, Alexander Wong, and Richard L. Hughson. Journal of Applied Physiology 124 (2)
Volume 124Issue 2February 2018Pages 473-48 https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00299.2017 [Published] 23 Feb 2018

This paper is behind a paywall.

Interested parties can find Carré Technologies here.