When Asel Sartbaeva took her infant daughter in for immunizations she noticed that the vaccines had to be removed from refrigerated storage and used almost immediately. This felt like a solvable, although huge, problem to Sartbaeva and she started down the path of developing vaccines that could be stable at room temperature. In her Solve for X talk Thermally Stable Vaccines, Asel talks about the ideas behind her project and its progress.
More than 2.5 million children under five years old die every year from vaccine preventable diseases. This is the statistic used to illustrate the problem of the cold chain required to deliver vaccines to patients. In the last leg of the trip from manufacture, shipping, customs, and delivery about forty percent of vaccine waste occurs. Vaccines require refrigeration at all times and in developing nations issues like traffic, corruption, lack of stable electricity, and lack of infrastructure can all disrupt the act of getting vaccines from an airport to the clinic and patient. My favorite graphic from the talk shows vaccines being transported by camel, horse, and humans holding a cold box.
Sartbaeva’s solution comes from the idea that vaccines are protein based. Several structures are built around the vaccine to help delivery, but those additional structures fall away at room temperature. Asel compares this to boiling an egg, and the tightly packed proteins in the egg unpacking themselves and taking up more and more space until solid. Asel is using silica to attempt to build a cage structure around the vaccines and prevent denaturation. Silica is present in nature, cheap and abundant. Working to control the growth of silica around a vaccine to prevent the structure of the vaccine from falling apart. Vaccines stored in this method can much more easily be transported and administered.
This talk is a few years old but Asel Sartbaeva continues her work at the University of Bath and was named one of the 175 Faces of Chemistry by the Royal Society of Chemistry. The latest publication surrounding this work discusses flexibility in porous materials, from December 2015. This is a fascinating presentation and I hope more and more progress is made in the near future.