May-2019
McMaster Researchers Create a Better Way to Transport Life-Saving Vaccines
Researchers at McMaster University have invented a stable, affordable way to store fragile vaccines for weeks at a time at temperatures up to 40C, opening the way for life-saving anti-viral vaccines to reach remote and impoverished regions of the world.
The new method combines the active ingredients in existing vaccines with a sugary gel, where they remain viable for eight weeks or more, even at elevated temperatures.
The method creates light, durable, and compact doses that would be ideal for shipping Ebola vaccine, for example, to affected regions of Africa, the researchers say. The process adds only marginal cost to preparing a vaccine and eliminates almost all the cost of transporting it – which can account for 80 per cent of the total cost of inoculation.
Combining the vaccines and the sugars – pullulan and trehalose – is almost as simple as stirring cream and sugar into coffee, the researchers say. The storage technology was created by chemical engineers at McMaster, who had already demonstrated its effectiveness in other applications, such as an edible coating that can prolong the shelf life of fruits and vegetables.
To apply the technology to vaccines, the engineers collaborated with health sciences colleagues across campus who specialize in virology and immunology. Their work is published today in the journal Scientific Reports.
“This, to us, is the ultimate application of this technology,” said the paper’s lead author Vincent Leung, an assistant professor of Chemical Engineering. “To imagine that something we worked on in the lab could one day be used to save people’s lives is very exciting.”
The invention is significant because it can replace the cumbersome “cold chain” – constant storage at temperatures between 2C and 8C – which is currently necessary to keep anti-viral vaccines viable. Maintaining the cold chain is a significant barrier to inoculating people in remote or poor regions of the world, where the infrastructure to refrigerate and transport vaccines smoothly may not be available.
To read the full Nature World News article, click here or the CHCH piece here