Vaccine refrigeration — which can be expensive and logistically challenging, but still needed — could become unnecessary, thanks to research from a Penn State team.
“So it was kind of a crazy idea that came out of an observation that we made," said Scott Medina, William and Wendy Korb Early Career Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Penn State and lead researcher on the project.
He said as it is now vaccines have to be kept cold for two reasons: To keep them stable, and to avoid contamination. But keeping them cold can be expensive and logistically difficult.
That’s where his team’s work comes in. They found that if they used certain surfactants — a molecule that coats the surface of the protein— they could take a protein that normally would want to be in a water-based solution and put it in an oil-based solution. In doing that, they opened the door to keeping vaccines safe and stable without refrigeration.
“We've been able to address both of those issues with this formulation because we've improved the stability so it's no longer able to be inactivated under the conditions that normal proteins would be," Medina said. "But because now those proteins are no longer in a water environment, they can't be contaminated by bacteria, fungi, viruses that require water in order to survive and grow.”
Not only would this new approach save money, by potentially eliminating the need for costly cold-chain logistics, he said. It could also allow vaccines and proteins to be used in places where cold-chain logistics are not possible, such as in battle.
More research and testing will be needed, but so far Medina said the results have been positive.
“I think what's maybe very personally satisfying is if this technology would lower the cost of drugs — so they would not only be available for more Americans, they would be less costly for Americans — but they could be more broadly applied internationally, to really benefit human health.”
The research was published in Nature Communications. It was funded by DARPA — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
