Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
ASEL SARTBEAVA: Good morning, everybody.
My name's Asel Sartveav, and the x I will talk today about
is making vaccines thermally stable at room temperatures.
Before I go into talking about this problem,
I just wanted to tell you in a very short story about how
I came up with this idea.
So less than three years ago after the birth of my daughter,
I took her to the doctor to be vaccinated.
And what I observed was that the vaccines
had to be taken out of the fridge
and administered pretty much immediately.
And that made me thinking, what if I
can use an inorganic material or my knowledge
of inorganic material to try and stabilize the vaccines so
that they will be stable at room temperature?
And that's how it all started.
So let me tell you more about the problem.
More than 2.5 million children under five
die every year from vaccine preventable diseases.
These are diseases like pneumonia, rotavirus, tetanus,
whooping cough-- all of these disease can--
they have vaccines.
So these deaths could have been prevented
if children received lifesaving vaccines.
The biggest problem why they don't receive these vaccines
is our reliance on cold change.
So, what is cold chain?
When vaccines are produced by manufacturers,
they immediately have to be stored.
They immediately have to be stored in refrigerators.
They're then transported around in the vans
using refrigerators.
And a lot of them have to be flown to different countries.
And again, we have to use refrigerators here.
Usually when they arrive to the country of destination,
they're stored in the warehouses before being
transported around.
And again, they have to be stored in refrigerators.
Finally, they arrived to the local hospitals
where they have to be refrigerated up
until the point they can be administered to the patients.
Almost at the end of this.
So if there is a problem with electricity, for example,
we get vaccines wasted on the way.
And up to this point, we waste about 5% of the vaccines.
But in the last leg, we waste today
about 40% of the vaccines.
And until recently, this waste was even 80%.
So why do we waste so much?
Well, here is why.
In the last leg of their journey,
they're transport on camel backs, on horse backs,
on the bicycles, or by people walking around with cold boxes.
And a lot of these vaccines don't actually
survive even for more than an hour above 20 degrees
centigrade.
So you can see where the waste is coming from.
Apart from waste, there is a big cost
associated with cold chain.
So, UNICEF is the biggest distributor of vaccines
worldwide.
And what they say is that at the moment,
they're paying about 95% of the cost
of the vaccinating programs into cold chain and transport.
And they estimate that they spend more than $300 million
on cold chain only.
And this number is increasing every year.
So this is the reason why vaccines transport is so hard.
They have to be stored precisely between two to eight degrees
centigrade.
Above or below those temperatures,
the proteins in the vaccines denature and they lose
their potency and people cannot be vaccinated with them.
So today, only two diseases worldwide
have been eliminated-- smallpox and rinderpest.
Interestingly, both of these diseases
have naturally huge resistant vaccines.
Another disease which is almost eliminated today is polio.
Injectable polio vaccine is not heat-stable at room
temperature.
But there is another formulation.
There's also an orally-delivered polio vaccine.
And that vaccine is heat-stable.
So that's helping us to try and eliminate
this disease worldwide at the moment.
So let us look at the vaccines Apart from DNA-based vaccines,
most vaccines are based in their structure on proteins.
So if we look here, we have viruses, virus-like particles,
and protein complexes.
The vaccines have a secondary structure
which consists of alpha helixes and beta sheets.
They have a tertiary structure where
the protein is folded neatly into a specific shape.
And they also have a quaternary structure
where we have several proteins folded together.
And we can see that on the right hand side on the virus.
Proteins denature by losing their quaternary, tertiary,
or secondary structure.
So here is a schematic movie showing you
protein denaturation.
so What's happening here is that this protein
is losing its secondary and tertiary structure.
It's basically unfolding.
This is analogous to boiling an egg.
When we boil an egg, proteins in an egg unfold and tangle up.
And we all know it's impossible to unboil an egg.
So to combat this, I thought, maybe
we can use an inorganic material, silica,
to try and cage the vaccines to prevent them from denaturation.
There are lots of reasons why I chose silica, but let
me just tell you several of them.
So firstly, silica is a non-toxic material.
It's very abundant.
It's very cheap.
It's something what sand is made of.
And we have a lot of sand on Earth.
I also take inspiration here from nature.
There are tiny creatures, marine diatoms
which live in rivers and oceans.
And what they do is they make silica coating
around their bodies.
And this coaching preserves them from the environment.
There also have been mummies of Urumchi
which have been preserved for thousands
of years in the dryness of sand.
So all of this tells us that there
is a possibility of using silicon
to help us here with this problem.
So what we're trying to do at the moment
is to see if we can use very simple chemistry,
sol-gel chemistry, to grow protective coating
around each specific virus or protein within the vaccines.
And we think that this coating can preserve the vaccines
from denaturation.
So it can help us to store the vaccines without the fridges.
So what's happening here is that this silica shell,
it's physically preventing the vaccine
from unfolding and from losing its secondary or tertiary
structure-- so from losing its shape.
Once the vaccine have been stored like this,
it can be obviously transported around.
And then it can be administered to the patients.
And here, we thought about different scenarios
of how we can administer the vaccines.
In the first one, we can administer
both silica and the vaccine orally.
So this is very analogous to the existing polio oral vaccine.
So here, the vaccine and silica will pass through the stomach.
And stomach acids would attack silica, weaken it,
and the vaccine will be released in the bowel.
In the second route, we're thinking
about injecting the vaccines.
So we want to break down the silica
just before the vaccine is injected.
So here, we are looking at several very easy chemical
methods to break down the silica shell.
And then they inject the vaccine.
The third route, and this is the most speculative route,
is directly injecting silica with the vaccine
into the bloodstream or intramuscularly
into the patients.
And this is the route which we have not explored so far,
but we're not ruling it out.
Part from the vaccines, there are
a lot of other biological substances
which require cold chain.
These are antibodies, insulin, different drugs,
antibiotics anti-venom drugs.
So all of these substance may-- for all the substances,
we might be able to use a similar method
to preserve them and store them without cold chain.
So just to wrap it up, we don't really
need-- we have a lot of really good vaccines already
so we don't really need to change them
and to come up with new formulations.
What I'm proposing here is just to add the silica right
at the very beginning when we make the vaccines.
And this will allow us basically to store and transport
the vaccines without requiring refrigeration.
So potentially, this can save a lot of energy,
it can save a lot of money, and most importantly, it
can save millions of lives.
Thank you for your attention.