Breath Strips Inspire Research Into Heat-Resistant Vaccines
A team of scientists with the Biointerfaces Institute at McMaster University has received a grant award of $100,000 from Grand Challenges Canada for their research in heat-resistant vaccines for low-income countries.
The team is investigating a compound found in breath freshening film strips that can be used to develop a simpler, cost-effective method of administering and delivering vaccines. The researchers say they hope to cross out the need to keep vaccines in ‘cold chain’ or refrigeration during transport or storage overseas.
Carlos Filipe, the project’s lead researcher, says that 80 percent of costs in vaccination are spent on distribution as most vaccines need to be kept refrigerated in order to keep their active ingredients from deterioration. The need to keep vaccines in the ‘cold chain’ presents a challenge in transporting vaccines to parts of the developing world where electricity is often subject to interruptions or shortages. “If you think of a place like India where there are more power outages, and you keep a vaccine in the refrigerator, you never know how much of it still remains active,” observed Filipe, a professor of chemical engineering at McMaster University.
The McMaster research team discovered that live vaccines could be preserved at room temperature by infusing them into a mixture of the compound pullulan, an edible polymer found in breath strips. Pullulan is derived from a common type of fungus that normally maintains a solid state but is quickly dissolved in water. Filipe said that the vaccine’s biological molecules are trapped in the pudding-like film to preserve them. “For a variety of reasons, it stabilizes the enzymes, so it prevents them from degrading with temperature and stops them from rubbing against each other and forming like a cake,” he said.
The scientists said that they will devote much of next year to further study the vaccine with the help of the grant. They plan to store vaccine-loaded tabs at a range of temperatures up to 40 C and then administer them to laboratory mice to test its efficacy.
The team’s efforts are in alliance with recent analysis from Frost & Sullivan that suggests vaccine production is on track to shift from traditional needle-based, cold chain products to innovative vaccines. These include patches, degradable implants, inhalers, and fast dissolving tablet vaccines. Such vaccines will address the inefficiency and expensive costs associated with standard vaccine distribution.
The industry has been receiving some pressure to explore new formulations for vaccines in order to ensure that all those who need vaccines in hard-to-reach locations are able to receive potential life-saving treatment. Earlier this year, Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) petitioned pharmaceutical companies to develop heat-resistant vaccines that can be delivered and used outside of the cold chain. The group argued that easy-to-use vaccines can enable MSF and other humanitarian groups to safely deliver life-saving vaccines all over the world.