Recent advances in “smart” drug delivery promise safer, more efficient and, ultimately, more effective medicine for all. Currently competing for this year’s INVENT awards is Vaccine Tabs, with an innovation that could avoid many of the difficulties with current vaccine products. The Vaccine Tabs team, from the School of Pharmacy in Queen’s University Belfast has developed a vaccine delivery system that could prove to be easier, cheaper, safer and more comfortable than the familiar needle and syringe.
The Tabs are little pellets that carry vaccine into the patient by sticking to the inside of the patient’s nose. At this stage, the team has been applying these pellets to the nasal cavity using a syringe with the needle and tip cut off. It’s a simple hack. But even in this prototypical form, the Tabs are reliably adhering to the tissue and delivering the vaccine. The process isn’t just painless, you can’t feel it at all. Nevertheless, a custom applicator is being developed to be less intrusive still.
A needle-free product like this avoids the difficulties that injectables bring wherever they are used. Needles and syringes require training to use, need to be properly disposed of, and present the danger of needlestick to anyone handling them. There’s also a common discomfort with needles and puncturing the skin that could be avoided.
Similar products have been held back in the past by the difficulty of carrying vaccines through the medium of
the nasal tissue. Natural carriers called liposomes are used to encase proteins such as vaccines but the liposomes tend to themselves be unstable and quickly grow too large to pass through the tissue. The Vaccine Tab technology ensures that the liposomes and vaccine are stable during storage. On contact with the moist nasal wall, the Tab becomes a gel and sticks in place, releasing the liposomes that carry the vaccine to the immune system. The team has patented a liposome that stays small and targets the vaccine to the immune system. Vaccine Tabs founder Dr Vicky Kett is an expert in this kind of formulation.
Nasal vaccinations aren’t that new. The US in particular has been administering them widely for a few years, and Great Britain introduced its first round of nasal vaccinations in schools last year. But those are sprays, like the ones used for Hay Fever and similar allergies. Vaccines in these products typically have short shelf lives, surviving a few weeks if consistently refrigerated and then becoming redundant within a few hours at room temperature.
Vaccine Tabs has created a product that is not only thicker – for a controlled, release – but much more thermally stable, to offer the potential of surviving without the “cold chain” of refrigerated transportation and storage. Additionally, smart delivery systems like Vaccine Tabs mean the need to put less drugs into the body for the same effect. In future, these formats could be used to develop vaccines for Alzheimer’s, Cancer and Parkinson’s.
Being needle-free and thermally stable could be of particular benefit to the developing world. Healthcare workers on the frontline suffer from complex and unreliable cold chains for transporting medicine to where it’s needed. And the requirement for training takes skilled people away from other tasks. Vaccine Tabs is in conversation with some of the world’s leading charities and NGOs to provide help around the world.
- See more at: http://www.nispconnect.org/techwatch/#sthash.uFnpK9wX.dpuf
