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Zhang, who is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, a core institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is the senior author of the new study. The MIT team took a different approach: They wanted to see if they could create a temporary factory" in the body that would generate the T-cell-stimulating signals that are normally produced by the thymus. When injected into the bloodstream, these particles accumulate in the liver, and the mRNA is taken up by hepatocytes, which begin to manufacture the proteins encoded by the mRNA. In 18-month-old mice that received the mRNA treatment before vaccination, the researchers found that the population of cytotoxic T-cells specific to ovalbumin doubled, compared to mice of the same age that did not receive the mRNA treatment."