The National Institutes of Health has awarded Northeastern University professor of chemical engineering Shashi Murthy a four-year $1.4 million grant to develop a novel instrument that would ease a "tremendous bottleneck" in vaccine development. Vaccines work by giving dendritic cells information on the particular infection, the university said in a statement. For example, a vaccine might "tell" dendritic cells to send T cells in response to an infection. In vaccine development, dendritic cells are produced outside the body in a 16-step process that can take 6 days. Murthy seeks to make a fully automated microfluidic system that could cut down the amount of time it takes to generate dendritic cells from a blood sample. Report