The Georgia Institute of Technology will receive funding through Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that enables researchers worldwide to test unorthodox ideas that address health and development challenges.

Mark Prausnitz, Regents’ Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, will pursue a global health research project focused on using microneedle patches for the administration of the polio vaccine through the skin in collaboration with researchers Steve Oberste and Mark Pallansch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
 
“We believe in the power of innovation—that a single bold idea can pioneer solutions to our greatest health and development challenges,” says Chris Wilson, director of global health discovery for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “Grand Challenges Explorations seeks to identify and fund these new ideas wherever they come from, allowing scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs to pursue the kinds of creative ideas and novel approaches that could help to accelerate the end of polio, cure HIV infection or improve sanitation.”

The goal of the Georgia Tech/CDC project is to demonstrate the scientific and economic feasibility for using microneedle patches in vaccination programs aimed at eradicating the polio virus. Current vaccination programs use an oral polio vaccine that contains a modified live virus. The vaccine can be administered in door-to-door immunization campaigns, but in rare cases the vaccine can cause polio. There is an alternative injected vaccine that uses killed virus, which carries no risk of polio transmission, which requires refrigeration for storage and must be administered by trained personnel. To eradicate polio from the world, health officials will have to discontinue use of the oral vaccine with its live virus, replacing it with the more logistically-complicated injected vaccine.

Prausnitz and his CDC collaborators believe the use of microneedle patches could reduce the cost and simplify administration of the injected vaccine. Use of the patches, which carry vaccine into the body by dissolving into the skin, could eliminate the need for administration by highly-trained personnel and the “sharps” disposal problems of traditional hypodermic needles. Because skin administration produces an immune response with smaller doses of vaccine than traditional deep intramuscular injection, the researchers expect to reduce the per-person cost of vaccine. And by incorporating dried vaccine into the microneedles, they hope to eliminate the need for vaccine refrigeration—a challenge in remote areas of the world.

“We envision vaccination campaigns in which minimally-trained personnel go door-to-door administering microneedle patches rather than oral polio vaccine,” Prausnitz explains. “Our goal for this study will be to provide the data to scientifically justify moving the microneedle patch for polio vaccination into a human trial.” 

Release Date: Nov. 8, 2011
Source: Georgia Institute of Technology