Vaccine production time cut from months to weeks
Scientists from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Queensland in Australia have teamed up and done extensive research. The collaboration ended up having amazing results. They announced that they are able to count, size and gauge the quality of virus-like particle-based (VLP) vaccines much more quickly and accurately than it was possible before. This research could lead to being able to produce a vaccine within several weeks, which is a great improvement when compared to the time that is needed at the moment (several months).
The current vaccine-building technique is acceptable, but sometimes the time is a crucial factor and that’s where that method fails.
“The problem with this approach is that it takes a long time to develop vaccines because viruses have to be grown in chicken eggs or cell culture, which can take months,” said Leonard Pease, a NIST researcher.
“Let’s take bird flu as an example — if it would spread, a vaccine would be needed immediatelly. By the time the vaccine is built, millions people could die,” said Pease.
Source: NIST, dx.doi.org/doi:10.1002/bit.22085
