Nanoparticle platform mimics a diseased cell’s surface and could be used to screen for effective targeted cancer immunotherapies

PHILADELPHIA, June 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Building upon a deep understanding of immune cell activation, researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) developed a new artificial platform that can be used to induce T cell activation and expansion. This provides an important foundation for improving immunotherapy approaches for treating cancer. The findings were published recently in the journal Science Advances.

Adaptive immunity describes how the body’s defense system learns to recognize and fight off threats and respond to those threats faster and more effectively. A core part of this immunity requires specialized cells called CD8+ T cells, which patrol the body looking for signs of disease by reading small protein fragments displayed on cell surfaces by molecules called human leukocyte antigens (HLA) proteins. To develop better cancer immunotherapies, researchers need tools that can quickly identify which of these protein fragments trigger a T cell response, but current methods are slow and difficult to scale up.

In this study, researchers built a nanoparticle platform, VLP-Open HLA, that mimics a diseased cell surface by presenting cancer-associated protein fragments on a virus-like nanoparticle. Importantly, the particles are not locked into displaying a single target: the displayed protein fragments can be swapped out quickly and easily, allowing researchers to screen many potential cancer targets in parallel.

“We show that these nanoparticles can find and activate T cells that recognize specific cancer targets in both laboratory cell lines and real human blood samples, without the need for the weeks-long process of growing specialized immune cells that most current approaches require,” said Nikolaos G. Sgourakis, PhD, Professor in the Center for Computational and Genomic Medicine at CHOP and the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania. “Because the system works across the many HLA protein variants found in different people and can be configured to carry multiple immune signals at once, it could serve as a foundation for personalized cancer vaccines and T cell therapies matched to an individual patient’s tumor.”

The platform was further optimized to induce antigen-specific T cell activation and expansion, which could serve as the basis for personalized T cell vaccines and T cell-based therapies used in cancer immunotherapy. 

This work was delivered as part of the NexTGen and MATCHMAKERS Teams supported by the Cancer Grand Challenges partnership funded by Cancer Research UK under grants CGCATF-2021/100002 and CGCATF-2023/100004, the National Cancer Institute grants CA278687-01 and OT2CA297575, and The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research. Additional support was provided by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants 5R01AI143997, 5R01AI182049-02, 5U01DK112217 and 7R35GM125034, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) Cell and Gene Therapy Seed Grant AWD-00004450, the CHOP Evelyn Willing Bromley Endowed Chair grant 722372062, and a NIH Instrumentation grant S10-OD030460. Additional support was provided by a NCI T32 training grant 5-T32-CA-009140-50. The Human Immunology Core at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania is supported in part by NIH grants P30 AI045008 and P30 CA016520.

Phan et al, “Ready-to-load MHC-I Nanoparticles for High-throughput T cell Screening Studies.” Sci Adv. Online June 12, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv2687.

About Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia:
A non-profit, charitable organization, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation’s first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals, and pioneering major research initiatives, the hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in the country. The institution has a well-established history of providing advanced pediatric care close to home through its CHOP Care Network, which includes more than 50 primary care practices, specialty care and surgical centers, urgent care centers, and community hospital alliances throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey. CHOP also operates the Middleman Family Pavilion and its dedicated pediatric emergency department in King of Prussia, the Behavioral Health and Crisis Center (including a 24/7 Crisis Response Center) and the Center for Advanced Behavioral Healthcare, a mental health outpatient facility. Its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents. For more information, visit https://www.chop.edu.

Contact: Ben Leach
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
(609) 634-7906
Leachb@email.chop.edu

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SOURCE Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia