UVA Health scientists have developed a new method to create vaccines that may significantly reduce the time and cost associated with vaccine production. The approach, led by Steven L. Zeichner, MD, PhD, from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, aims to accelerate the design and deployment of vaccines during infectious disease outbreaks.
Zeichner's vaccine platform is reported to be faster than current mRNA technologies, which themselves were an advance over traditional methods. One advantage of this new method is its potential to overcome storage limitations faced by mRNA vaccines. The vaccines developed using this technique could be manufactured at existing facilities worldwide at a very low cost and do not require continuous cold storage. This could facilitate vaccine distribution in remote areas.
The team has already constructed the platform and demonstrated its effectiveness in generating strong immune responses. According to their findings, they were able to enhance the immunogenicity of a test vaccine target by about eight times compared with initial tests.
The process involves identifying promising components of infectious organisms for vaccine targets, then designing a vaccine that shapes the immune response. The design is verified using AlphaFold AI protein structure prediction software before synthetic DNA instructions are created. These instructions are placed into plasmids and introduced into bacteria, which are then grown and inactivated to produce the vaccine—a process described as simpler than that used for mRNA or other modern vaccines.
Vaccines based on killed whole cell bacteria have been made for over a century in factories worldwide for both humans and animals. Zeichner's platform adapts this established method but introduces significant enhancements in speed and cost-effectiveness.
The resulting vaccines are expected to cost less than $1 per dose, making them accessible even in countries with limited resources. They are also shelf-stable for long periods, which can help reach populations in developing regions more quickly during health emergencies.
"We know that in a pandemic it is very important for everyone to be able to get vaccines. First, because we want to protect everyone, but also, second, because we know that new disease variants that can be resistant to existing vaccines arise in unprotected populations where disease runs wild. Protecting everyone in the world is not just an altruistic goal, but also a self-interested one," Zeichner said.
"Vaccines need to be safe and effective, but it is also important that we can make vaccines against new threats very quickly, so that we can respond to new pandemics," he added. "Goverments and others have stated that a new vaccine for a pandemic threat should be able to be made in 100 days, but we think that with our platform we can make a new vaccine for testing in 3 weeks."
Details of the research appear as a cover story in the journal Vaccines and are available as open access. The research team included Juan Sebastian Quintero-Barbosa, Yufeng Song, Frances Mehl, Shubham Mathur, Lauren Livingston, Xiaoying Shen, David C. Montefiori, Joshua Tan and Zeichner himself.
Patent applications related to this technology have been filed by UVA's Licensing & Ventures Group.
