Spider silk is a fantastic material that’s extremely resistant and even has antibacterial properties. One of its biggest advantages in terms of medical applications is that spider silk is biocompatible, which means that it can coexist with living tissue without harming it.
Therefore, there’s little surprise that a team of researchers from several universities in Switzerland and Germany have thought that spider silk would make a great method of vaccine delivery in the fight against cancer.
The trick with cancer vaccines is that, in order to work and strengthen the immune system, they need to stimulate a type of cells called T lymphocytes (T-cells), which specialize in sniffing out cancer cells.
The trouble is, this can only be done with the help of a tiny peptide — a molecule smaller than a protein and made up of a chain of amino acids, notes Encyclopædia Britannica, which gives a full account of the difference between peptides and proteins.
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