Sounds like a cool technology - basically 5000 very tiny needles instead of one standard one (though conventional vaccine needles have gotten very small). I wonder how much it costs to manufacture.
If I were him I'd ask why not just print the spikes at the vaccine factory and inject them?
TBH I'm not sure if it's easier/cheaper to use the 3D-printers in our cells, or its more about accurate delivery to the right places, or something else.
> administered with a disposable needle-free injector, which uses a narrow stream of the fluid to penetrate the skin and deliver the jab to the proper tissue.
> They can also be stored at higher temperatures - 2 to 8C. Cadila Healthcare claims that their vaccine had shown "good stability" at 25C for at least three months
No needles means, ideally, less training needed to administer. This can keep medical staff working hospitals, where they are needed. And high temperature storage means easier handling, less spoilage.
Even if efficacy is lower with this vaccine, it's still going to save millions of lives of people who don't live in wealthy cities.
I've mostly examined cell-based vectors, ie engineered viruses that grow on cells, or a bacterial/fungal vector for the neoepitopes. The major cost savings that I have seen is to shrink the size of the per-person manufacturing facility from a clean room that can hold a technician down to a box roughly the size of a microwave that uses robotics. This can shrink a 7 figure $ cost down to 5- to 6- figures.
I remember over lunch with a person researching custom DNA vaccines and he mentioned to get personalized injectable grade DNA made per person costs a million dollars. My mind was blown.
Exaxtly this. Are the inputs available and we can spend just a few tens of billions on building gigafactories to make this process parallel and controlled? Then it’s like making microchips from silicon or gold from ore. Terrible yield but cheap inputs and a scalable process.
If the inputs are expensive or the process can’t scale (to a billion doses in 12 months, say) then that’s worrying and perhaps indicates this isn’t a good candidate vaccine.
Syringes would be easier to adulterate, are made of plastic (could have substances that modify or mess with the vaccine compounds, glass is inert and clean) and would add several extra problems in the manufacturing part like leakage, disassembling when filled or breaking.
Following the same reasoning an even better way to do it would be a big bottle connected with a machine that would deliver the correct dose. Such machine should fulfill at least the next points
1) Assure the vaccine integrity and identify. Grant that the product has not been modified at any point (closed metallic bottle that can't be pierced or manipulated with an official seal difficult to duplicate or fake.
2) Keep the product refrigerated and watch its temperature all the time.
3) Travel. A metallic bottle would stand transport much better than glass and would need less packaging materials.
Autonomous system can be just put in a pickup and moved to places without accurate refrigeration. Not need to build expensive rooms or hospitals and reaching isolated areas
4) Assure the same dose to everybody and change automatically the needle without the need of any human hand near the needle's boxes. Avoiding injuries and diseases
5) Discard safely the used needle and trow it into a secure recycling compartment.
6) Allow people to enter their own personal data and ID card in a keyboard or card slot before being vaccinated. then, keep this data safe stored into a database far from curious eyes
7) Share the number of vaccines used in real time or almost with the other teams. Thus the government could know what machines must be refilled and how many old needles boxes should be replaced in real time and plan according. If a place is not getting enough stream of people, the machine could be recalled to the next near place that is too busy
8) Avoid the human factor. Machines are tireless and fast. Don't need to make breaks or sleep as humans, don't care about skin color and can be bribed by local corrupts or the hate department.
Automatic vaccining machines could made a bigger difference than vaccines prepackaged in syringes, for sure, I wonder why nobody has created one still.
There’s a world of nearly eight billion people to vaccinate out there, and the manufacturing capacity may be useful when we start playing with mRNA vaccines for things like malaria.
Although in this era of modern biotechnology, especially for a 3rd World targeted vaccine, it would be appalling to develop one that was expensive to manufacture. I.e. nothing like the standard old flu vaccine, which is grown in the membranes of chicken eggs, yielding about 3 doses from each egg. Compare to e.g. the Protein Sciences method, which uses genetically modified insect cells in a bioreactor, which as I recall produces about 100,000 doses in a week or so (although it normally takes another 5-7 weeks to finish the vaccine once a batch of raw antigen is done).
Agreed, we’ve never produced a vaccine of this type at scale nor managed the required supply chain considerations. Making 10K efficacious non-harmful vaccines for a trial may be much easier than making 100M or 1B. Some processes don’t scale easily.
When you do this sort of thing there's generally an intermediate step between producing a small number of doses in "the lab" and real mass production, where you figure out how to efficiently and safely produce mass quantities.
Just talked to somebody yesterday who had one of these vaccines made for their dog. It actually seemed incredibly affordable compared to other treatments, something like 500-2000 for the formation of the vax.
As a software/hardware guy who knows less than zero about the subject: is this something that (given the right resources) makes possible to replicate the vaccines? I mean in countries where they can't afford enough vaccines but already have or could invest in the ability to replicate them without caring about patents.
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