Building Stable Vaccines

If we could make vaccines more stable, it would speed their creation, decrease their cost, and improve their safety. It would also make it much easier to deliver life-saving vaccines to people in all corners of the world.

Sarah Perry, associate professor of chemical engineering, is part of a multi-institutional team awarded a National Science Foundation grant for a project that could improve vaccine stability. Her team is combining lab experiments with a machine learning algorithm to sort through massive amounts of complex data.

New generations of biologic drugs are developed from living sources and tend to be more sensitive to temperature changes. This has been seen most recently with the storage and delivery challenges associated with several of the COVID-19 vaccines. These vaccines and many other biologic drugs remain dependent on a “cold chain,” or low- temperature-controlled supply chain, to maintain efficacy. The logistics and expense of maintaining such a cold chain increase the cost and limit the availability of such treatments. Popular biologics currently on the market include insulin, arthritis drugs Humira and Enbrel, the cancer drug Herceptin, and the COVID-19 vaccine.

While the work under the grant is focusing on viruses, what is learned could be applicable to more complex drugs, Perry says. 

“This could go beyond viruses to other types of vaccines, or other kinds of medical therapeutics,” she says. “We’re hoping to have a solid, molecularly informed view of how to design temperature- stable formulations.”