Vaccine printer could help vaccines reach more people
Getting vaccines to individuals who want them isn’t at all times straightforward. Many vaccines require chilly storage, making it tough to ship them to distant areas that don’t have the required infrastructure.
MIT researchers have give you a attainable resolution to this drawback: a cellular vaccine printer that could possibly be scaled as much as produce a whole lot of vaccine doses in a day. This type of printer, which might match on a tabletop, could possibly be deployed wherever vaccines are wanted, the researchers say.
“We might sometime have on-demand vaccine manufacturing,” says Ana Jaklenec, a analysis scientist at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Most cancers Analysis. “If, for instance, there was an Ebola outbreak in a selected area, one might ship a number of of those printers there and vaccinate the folks in that location.”
The printer produces patches with a whole lot of microneedles containing vaccine. The patch may be hooked up to the pores and skin, permitting the vaccine to dissolve with out the necessity for a standard injection. As soon as printed, the vaccine patches may be saved for months at room temperature.
In a study showing immediately in Nature Biotechnology, the researchers confirmed they may use the printer to provide thermostable Covid-19 RNA vaccines that would induce a comparable immune response to that generated by injected RNA vaccines, in mice.
Jaklenec and Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and a member of the Koch Institute, are the senior authors of the research. The paper’s lead authors are former MIT postdoc Aurelien vander Straeten, Morteza Sarmadi PhD ’22, and postdoc John Daristotle.
Printing vaccines
Most vaccines, together with mRNA vaccines, should be refrigerated whereas saved, making it tough to stockpile them or ship them to places the place these temperatures can’t be maintained. Moreover, they require syringes, needles, and educated well being care professionals to manage them.
To get round this impediment, the MIT group got down to discover a option to produce vaccines on demand. Their unique motivation, earlier than Covid-19 arrived, was to construct a tool that would shortly produce and deploy vaccines throughout outbreaks of ailments akin to Ebola. Such a tool could possibly be shipped to a distant village, a refugee camp, or army base to allow speedy vaccination of enormous numbers of individuals.
As an alternative of manufacturing conventional injectable vaccines, the researchers determined to work with a novel kind of vaccine supply based mostly on patches in regards to the measurement of a thumbnail, which comprise a whole lot of microneedles. Such vaccines are actually in growth for a lot of ailments, together with polio, measles, and rubella. When the patch is utilized to the pores and skin, the guidelines of the needles dissolve underneath the pores and skin, releasing the vaccine.
“When Covid-19 began, considerations about vaccine stability and vaccine entry motivated us to attempt to incorporate RNA vaccines into microneedle patches,” Daristotle says.
The “ink” that the researchers use to print the vaccine-containing microneedles contains RNA vaccine molecules which can be encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles, which assist them to stay secure for lengthy intervals of time.
The ink additionally accommodates polymers that may be simply molded into the precise form after which stay secure for weeks or months, even when saved at room temperature or larger. The researchers discovered {that a} 50/50 mixture of polyvinylpyrrolidone and polyvinyl alcohol, each of that are generally used to type microneedles, had the very best mixture of stiffness and stability.
Contained in the printer, a robotic arm injects ink into microneedle molds, and a vacuum chamber under the mould sucks the ink right down to the underside, ensuring that ink reaches all the best way to the guidelines of the needles. As soon as the molds are crammed, they take a day or two to dry. The present prototype can produce 100 patches in 48 hours, however the researchers anticipate that future variations could possibly be designed to have larger capability.
Antibody response
To check the long-term stability of the vaccines, the researchers first created an ink containing RNA that encodes luciferase, a luminescent protein. They utilized the ensuing microneedle patches to mice after being saved at both 4 levels Celsius or 25 levels Celsius (room temperature) for as much as six months. Additionally they saved one batch of the particles at 37 levels Celsius for one month.
Beneath all of those storage situations, the patches induced a robust luminescent response when utilized to mice. In distinction, the luminescent response produced by a standard intramuscular injection of the luminescent-protein-encoding RNA declined with longer storage instances at room temperature.
Then, the researchers examined their Covid-19 microneedle vaccine. They vaccinated mice with two doses of the vaccine, 4 weeks aside, then measured their antibody response to the virus. Mice vaccinated with the microneedle patch had an analogous response to mice vaccinated with a standard, injected RNA vaccine.
The researchers additionally noticed the identical robust antibody response once they vaccinated mice with microneedle patches that had been saved at room temperature for as much as three months.
“This work is especially thrilling because it realizes the flexibility to provide vaccines on demand,” says Joseph DeSimone, a professor of translational drugs and chemical engineering at Stanford College, who was not concerned within the analysis. “With the potential of scaling up vaccine manufacturing and improved stability at larger temperatures, cellular vaccine printers can facilitate widespread entry to RNA vaccines.”
Whereas this research centered on Covid-19 RNA vaccines, the researchers plan to adapt the method to provide different varieties of vaccines, together with vaccines produced from proteins or inactivated viruses.
“The ink composition was key in stabilizing mRNA vaccines, however the ink can comprise numerous varieties of vaccines and even medicine, permitting for flexibility and modularity in what may be delivered utilizing this microneedle platform,” Jaklenec says.
Different authors of the paper are Maria Kanelli, Lisa Tostanoski, Joe Collins, Apurva Pardeshi, Jooli Han, Dhruv Varshney, Behnaz Eshaghi, Johnny Garcia, Timothy Forster, Gary Li, Nandita Menon, Sydney Pyon, Linzixuan Zhang, Catherine Jacob-Dolan, Olivia Powers, Kevin Corridor, Shahad Alsaiari, Morris Wolf, Mark Tibbitt, Robert Farra, and Dan Barouch.
The analysis was funded by the Biomedical Superior Analysis and Growth Authority (BARDA), the Belgian American Academic Basis, Wallonia-Brussels Worldwide, the Bodossaki Basis, the Onassis Basis, the U.S. Nationwide Institutes of Well being, and the Koch Institute Assist (core) Grant from the Nationwide Most cancers Institute.