CHOP Researchers Develop Nanoparticle Platform to Accelerate Cancer Immunotherapy Screening
Key Insights
Researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia developed VLP-Open HLA, a virus-like nanoparticle platform that mimics diseased cell surfaces to screen cancer (search) targets rapidly.
The platform can find and activate CD8+ T cells (search) that recognize specific cancer (search) targets in both cell lines and human blood samples without weeks-long cell culturing.
The system works across diverse HLA protein variants and can be configured to carry multiple immune signals, enabling personalized cancer (search) vaccines and T cell therapies.
Researchers from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed a novel nanoparticle platform that could dramatically accelerate the identification of effective cancer (search) immunotherapy targets. The platform, called VLP-Open HLA, mimics the surface of a diseased cell by presenting cancer-associated protein fragments on a virus-like nanoparticle, enabling high-throughput screening of T cell responses. The findings were published on June 12, 2026, in the journal Science Advances.
The innovation addresses a fundamental bottleneck in cancer (search) immunotherapy development: the need for tools that can quickly identify which protein fragments trigger a CD8+ T cell response. CD8+ T cells (search) are specialized immune cells that patrol the body reading small protein fragments displayed on cell surfaces by human leukocyte antigen (HLA) (search) proteins. Current methods for screening these interactions are slow and difficult to scale up.
"We show that these nanoparticles can find and activate T cells that recognize specific cancer (search) 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.
A Flexible, Swappable Platform
A key advantage of the VLP-Open HLA platform is its modularity. Unlike conventional approaches that lock particles into displaying a single target, the displayed protein fragments on these nanoparticles can be swapped out quickly and easily. This design allows researchers to screen many potential cancer (search) targets in parallel, dramatically increasing throughput.
The platform was further optimized to induce antigen-specific T cell activation and expansion, laying groundwork for personalized T cell vaccines and T cell-based therapies in cancer (search) immunotherapy.
Toward Personalized Cancer Immunotherapy
The platform's compatibility across the many HLA protein variants found in different patient populations represents a significant step toward truly personalized medicine. "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 (search) vaccines and T cell therapies matched to an individual patient's tumor," Sgourakis explained.
The research was conducted as part of the NexTGen and MATCHMAKERS Teams supported by the Cancer (search) Grand Challenges partnership, funded by Cancer Research UK under grants CGCATF-2021/100002 and CGCATF-2023/100004, along with the National Cancer Institute grants CA278687-01 and OT2CA297575, and The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research. Additional support came from multiple NIH grants, including 5R01AI143997, 5R01AI182049-02, 5U01DK112217, and 7R35GM125034.
The study, titled "Ready-to-load MHC-I Nanoparticles for High-throughput T cell Screening Studies," was published by Phan et al. with DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv2687.