Coupled carrier-message engineering for low-dose mRNA vaccination

In our recent ACS Nano study,1 we asked a practical question for next-generation mRNA vaccines: can dose, delivery route, antigen expression, and immune quality be improved by engineering the carrier and the message as one system? mRNA vaccines have already shown how rapidly a nucleic acid medicine can be designed and deployed.2,3,4 However, the field still faces constraints that matter beyond COVID-19: protection can wane, reactogenicity often rises with dose, and only a small fraction of injected material reaches antigen-presenting cells.