The biggest issue in vaccine transportation is maintaining the temperature. Vaccines need to be able to ship around the world and keeping them cool can be very costly and difficult. Not only is it hard to find a refrigerated unit that’s the right size, keeping it powered can be incredibly expensive. It’s only now that an effective and economical way has been developed by a start-up company, Stabilitech. Read more about Stakeholder Opinions: Vaccine antigen delivery technologies

Stabilitech, a pharmaceutical company based out of London says it has discovered a way to keep temperatures stable without the operating cost. There was apparently a project which germinated a two thousand year old palm tree seed, and this indicated that nature had its own methods of preservation. Stabilitech was one of the only companies that realized the potential of this discovery and set about finding the secrets that nature had used to keep those seeds alive.

Using nature’s own protein sequence, the company created a stabilization technique that was able to preserve even the most unstable of viruses. For example, they used measles which isn’t very stable in the first place to demonstrate the effectiveness of their technique. So far, it hasn’t let them down and the measles are still alive and kicking. Whether or not you want to consider that a good thing or not is totally up to you.

Not only is this great for transportation, it’s also good for keeping and stockpiling vaccines for all different conditions. One of the more common usages for this technique would be the flu vaccine. As you know, a vaccine involves a tiny dosage of the actual virus, and therefore it is important to be able to keep the flu virus alive within the vaccine.

Stabilitech hopes that the creation of its stabilization technique will help lower the cost of flu vaccines so companies are able to administer the vaccine without going bankrupt. This is just one of the things that the company hopes to achieve. For right now though, they say that their technology is still being experimented with and perfected, and is nowhere near ready to be released onto the public, though they do say that they hope to sign their first contract in 2010. They plan to sell the technology to different companies, and in no way plan to use it themselves, as that would be outside the scope of their business.