Transforming Global Health with Portable, Rapid-Response Vaccine Technology
Professor Valerie Ward is part of a new global coalition to revolutionize vaccine production with disruptive health technology. The technology is designed to enable local vaccine production, reducing production time from nine days to just one day. A breakthrough that has the potential to save millions of lives and significantly lower the cost of vaccine production.
The coalition led by the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) received $2.8 million from the Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI) to fund technology development to combat epidemics and pandemics. The aim is to make small transportable units to manufacture vaccines, making vaccines more accessible and better able to deal with local outbreaks.
Ward is working with researchers and industry partners in Brazil, the UK, and Canada to aid the world in responding more swiftly and equitably to future epidemics and pandemics.
The grant focuses on developing technology to meet two specific goals. The first is rapid production of vaccines. The second is to decentralize manufacturing so it can be produced at different sites in smaller batches.
At the heart of this initiative is MANGO (Manufacturing on the Go), a device developed by Dr. Keith Pardee at the University of Toronto. The MANGO device promises to automate the process of Viral-Like Particle (VLP) manufacturing.
VLPs are proteins that are so similar to viruses that the immune system responds to them as if they are a virus. The device uses a technique called cell-free expression, which does not rely on living cells to produce VLPs.
“VLPs are one of the new technologies for vaccines. They have all the virus proteins and structures, so the body sees it as a real virus, but it does not contain genetic parts of the virus, so it’s very safe,” says Ward, a Canada Research Chair in Microalgae Biomanufacturing.
VLPs are currently used in some vaccines, however, the existing process to manufacture VLPs is time-consuming as cell cloning and maintenance of Master and Working Cell Banks are currently needed for vaccine production.
There are many compounds in both a cell and cell-free system that are present and must be removed. Ward will play a critical role in ensuring the purity of vaccines created by the device. Her research focuses on programming the device to purify vaccines autonomously.
The concept behind the device is that users can load the required materials and provide instructions to manufacture a specific vaccine, and the MANGO device will use an automated process to create and purify a VLP-based vaccine, giving it the power to tackle a variety of global health threats at the local scale.
“We’re developing a technology that works better as a small-scale device for purification. We’re flipping the script- usually, with vaccines, you scale production up, not down. Here, we are doing the opposite to make vaccines safer and more accessible,” says Ward.
The impact of this technology will be transformative, enabling countries with no existing vaccine-producing infrastructure to produce vaccines locally.