Mobile Vaccine Printer Could Slow Spread Of Deadly Diseases In Far-Flung Places
By Alexa Heah, 27 Apr 2023
If there’s one thing the world has learned from the pandemic, it’s that it isn’t as easy as it seems to distribute vaccines to a large number of people—especially those situated in remote corners of the Earth.
One of the key issues is the fact that most vaccines require refrigeration, making them difficult to ship to far-flung countries that may not have the medical infrastructure in place to store the vials before administering them to patients.
To address this, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a mobile vaccine printer with the potential to be scaled up, so that it could eventually produce hundreds of vaccine doses in a day.
Completely eliminating the need to transport vaccines, this printer—which can fit on any tabletop—could be deployed anywhere in the world as a one-stop facility for on-demand vaccine production.
The mobile gadget works by producing patches with hundreds of microneedles, each containing particles of the vaccine. Doctors can administer these patches to patients’ skin, allowing the medication to dissolve into the body without the need for a typical injection.
Even better, once printed, these vaccine patches, measuring the size of a thumbnail, can remain safe for use at room temperature for months, doing away with the need for costly storage facilities that may not be available in times of a pandemic or in poorer regions.
According to a press release, before the COVID-19 outbreak, the scientists were initially inspired to create the printer as a solution to quickly producing and deploying vaccines during the Ebola outbreak.
The machine, which could be easily shipped to a remote village, refugee camp, or military base, would enable the rapid vaccination of large groups of people at once. In fact, the patches produced by the printer only require a day or two to dry.
At the moment, the current iteration of the gadget allows for 100 patches to be produced in 48 hours, with a robotic arm injecting “ink” into the microneedle molds—which can be easily shaped and remain stable for long periods of time.
Going forward, the researchers hope future versions of the mobile printer could be scaled up to have higher capacity, so more vials of vaccines can be produced in record time to help innoculate more of the population against diseases.
[via The National News and MIT / EurekAlert, images via MIT / EurekAlert (CC BY-ND 4.0)]