- [Host] Time for your vaccination.
This is going to hurt you not at all actually.
(intense electronic music)
Guys I want to talk to you about the future of vaccines.
And there's so much to say that we're going to do two
episodes about it.
In this one, we're really looking at vaccine delivery
and to really understand the importance of it,
we need to backtrack a bit.
When Edward Jenner first proposed
using cowpox to immunize people against smallpox,
he ushered in a brand new era of medicine
and he called it vaccination.
He named it after the Latin term for cowpox, vaccinia,
and the name stuck, just like most of us
end up getting stuck with various needles
whenever we go in to get vaccinations.
The basic way the vaccination works
is it introduces a small amount
of a weakened or dead pathogen, a bacteria or virus,
into a person's blood stream.
Then that person's immune system kicks into gear
and fights off this would be infection
and it learns in the process,
so if it ever encounters that same disease in the future,
it can fight it off effectively.
But isn't there a better way of getting it
than just a needle through the arm?
Well we're working on it.
Researchers have already developed and distributed
nasal vaccines for influenza for example.
And some are administered orally
and we're probably going to see a continuation
of that trend in what are called mucosal vaccines.
And this is really cool because it could provide
localized resistance to certain diseases
and in the process, give our entire body
more of a generalized resistance to that illness.
Or how about a vaccine through a patch?
Now these patches have tiny microneedles that are less
than a millimeter long and
they're made up of polymer, sugar, and vaccine.
When you apply a patch to a person's skin,
those needles puncture just the very top layer of skin.
It's said to be nearly or completely painless.
The CDC and our friends at Georgia Tech
have been hard at work at this patch technology.
One of the really interesting things about it
is it could increase accessibility to vaccines.
One, you don't need the expertise of applying
a hypodermic needle in order to administer this
and two it doesn't require all the other materials
you would use at a regular vaccination.
There are no needles, no syringes,
there's no need for a sharps disposal box,
you don't even need sterile water, just the patch.
A related issue is called cold chain management.
You see a lot of viruses only remain viable
if kept below a certain temperature.
But there are parts of the world that don't have
good cold storage options, so how do you get the medicine
to people who live there?
One way is by making more robust vaccines.
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health
worked to create a silk based stabilizer
that makes vaccines more resistant to higher temperatures.
In fact, they were able to show that
a vaccine remained viable even when exposed
to temperatures as high as 140 degrees fahrenheit.
Meanwhile, there's another technique that involves
using a very thin membrane,
coating that membrane with a vaccine,
and then covering it all up with sugar glass
making it a solid storage form.
Researchers have shown that this approach
is resistant to temperatures up to 113 degrees fahrenheit
for six months or longer.
Meanwhile, when they tested this against a control
group of liquid vaccines,
they found that half of their samples would die
within a week.
So the future of vaccine delivery is really promising
and I find it inspiring to see how
they're becoming more accessible
to greater numbers of people around the world.
We could be saving millions of lives here.
And that's about as forward thinking as it gets.
But I've got a question for you guys this week
and it's a doozy.
How would you solve the problem of global distribution
of vaccines?
Keeping in mind the limitations we've talked about
on this episode.
Because this is how we solve the worlds' problems guys
I wanna hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Thanks to Toyota for sponsoring the show
and making it possible.
If you enjoyed this episode,
hit that little like button for me
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And after that, check out these other amazing videos
of how awesome our future is gonna be right over here.
(electronic music)