Lab Chat: Replacing the 'cold chain' for vaccines

To deliver vaccines where they are needed means maintaining the “cold chain” through transport, a challenge in warmer climates where threats like Ebola emerge. Carlos Filipe’s team from McMaster University has an alternative that stays stable up to 40 degrees Celsius. Here’s what he told me about their work, published today in Scientific Reports:

Where did you get the idea?

We were working with an enzyme that was thermally unstable. During a trip to the supermarket, one of my grad students saw Listerine strips that go under the tongue. That film dissolves very quickly and it’s made of sugar. We knew some sugars have the ability to stabilize some biomolecules thermally. When we saw the results with the enzyme, it planted the seed in our minds to work with vaccines.

How does it work? And what’s next?

You have that vaccine in liquid form, you add the [sugars], you let it dry, and that’s it. It is cheap, it is simple, and the ingredients are FDA-approved, but these types of reformulations will require some investment.