The innovation is almost as easy “as stirring milk and sugar into coffee,” said Matthew Miller, an assistant professor in McMaster’s biochemistry department, who was part of the interdisciplinary team that worked on the project
. The process involves combining sugars used for other purposes with the drugs, turning the temperature-sensitive vaccine into a lightweight sugary gel that can travel for long periods through harsh climates.
Solar-powered, mini-refrigerators that can travel on the back of camels or wagons, have been one solution, says Vincent Leung, a chemical engineer at McMaster and the lead author of the paper published today in the journal Scientific Reports. But these are expensive and heavy, the units break down and they can only carry so much of the vaccine.
As researchers discovered, the same two ingredients – a pair of sugars called trehalose and pullulan, which are used to make the jelly coating on breath strips – could do the same for a delicate vaccine. Combine, stir and dry, and their work suggests that a vaccine would be able to travel safely and relatively cheaply in the sugary gel, protected from the heat for months.
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