A University of Virginia team is pioneering a vaccine platform designed to slash development time from months to weeks while cutting costs and easing distribution. The approach could help protect people and animals worldwide, including in low-resource and remote regions.
UVA Health scientists say they are closing in on a faster, cheaper way to make vaccines — one that could transform how the world responds to the next pandemic.
Steven L. Zeichner, from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, has built and is now optimizing a vaccine-development platform meant to dramatically speed up how quickly new vaccines can be designed, tested and deployed. The goal is to outpace even today’s mRNA vaccines, which were already a major leap forward during COVID-19.
Zeichner’s approach is designed not only for speed, but also for simplicity and affordability. It is intended to work without ultra-cold freezers, to be made in existing factories around the world and to cost potentially less than a dollar per dose. That combination could be crucial for getting vaccines quickly to people in low-resource and remote areas when a new infectious disease emerges.
In a field where mRNA vaccines have dominated recent headlines, Zeichner is careful to emphasize that current tools are strong but not sufficient on their own.
“The technologies that are currently available produce excellent, safe and effective vaccines against many diseases. However, there would be many benefits if vaccines could be made much faster and less expensively and were easier to distribute. We are trying to develop a new way, or platform, that will let us rapidly produce vaccines against existing infectious diseases and new infectious diseases that threaten humans and animals,” Zeichner, who is part of UVA’s Department of Pediatrics and Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology, said in a news release.
The team’s latest work offers a proof of concept. Using the new platform, they created experimental vaccines that were highly immunogenic — meaning they triggered a strong immune response. In some tests, they were able to boost the immune response to a vaccine target by about eightfold compared with an initial version.
That kind of jump suggests the platform can not only generate vaccines quickly, but also fine-tune them to work better.
At its core, the method combines modern computational tools with a very old idea in vaccinology.
First, researchers identify a piece of an infectious organism — such as a protein fragment — that looks like a promising vaccine target. They then design a vaccine that includes that target along with features meant to enhance and shape the immune response.
To check that the design has the right structure, they use AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence system that predicts how proteins fold in three dimensions. Once the design is confirmed, the team sends instructions to a synthetic DNA company.
The company synthesizes DNA that tells bacteria how to make the vaccine and packages that DNA into a small circular piece called a “plasmid.” That plasmid is then introduced into special bacteria. The bacteria are grown, inactivated and used as the vaccine.
The process is intentionally straightforward compared with the complex manufacturing required for many modern vaccines, including mRNA shots. It also builds on a long history: killed whole-cell bacterial vaccines, though more primitive, have been made and used safely for more than a century in both humans and animals.
Because the platform relies on abundant, easy-to-obtain starting materials and standard bacterial growth methods, it could be adopted by existing vaccine factories worldwide without massive new infrastructure.
“We hope that vaccines made using this new platform will be very easy and inexpensive to manufacture in existing factories around the world using very abundant and easy-to-obtain starting materials, and stable at ordinary refrigerator temperatures, so they are easy to distribute. We hope that the vaccines made using this platform will help prevent disease not only in people but also in animals, so that they can help farmers and consumers, and prevent diseases from spreading from animals to humans,” Zeichner added.
That animal angle matters. Many of the most dangerous infectious diseases — including influenza, coronaviruses and others — originate in animals before jumping to humans. A platform that can quickly generate vaccines for livestock and other animals could help stop some outbreaks before they reach people.
The potential cost is another major selling point. If doses can be produced for far less than a dollar and stored in ordinary refrigerators, countries with limited resources would be better positioned to protect their populations during global emergencies.
Zeichner stresses that rapid, equitable access is not just a moral issue but a practical one.
“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,” he said.
Global health leaders have set an ambitious benchmark: future pandemic vaccines should be ready in about 100 days. Zeichner believes his team’s platform can move even faster.
“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 (sic) 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.”
The team’s findings are published in the journal Vaccines, where their article is featured as a cover story and is freely available to read. Additional co-authors on the study include Juan Sebastian Quintero-Barbosa, Yufeng Song, Frances Mehl, Shubham Mathur, Lauren Livingston, Xiaoying Shen, David C. Montefiori and Joshua Tan.
UVA’s Licensing & Ventures Group has filed patent applications related to the platform, a sign that the university sees commercial and public health potential in the technology.
From here, the work will need to move through further testing, including safety and effectiveness studies in animals and, eventually, in people. Researchers will also need to show that the platform can be adapted quickly to a range of different pathogens, not just the initial test targets.
Still, the early results suggest a future in which the world is better prepared the next time a dangerous virus appears — with a vaccine design pipeline measured in weeks, not months, and doses that can reach communities everywhere, not just those with the most resources.
Source: UVA Health