3D Printed Thermostable Vaccine Patches

Are 3D printed vaccines the future? Researchers at MIT have developed a portable 3D printer capable of printing ready-to-use vaccine patches that are thermostable, meaning they can be stored for months at room temperature. Eventually, the machine will be able to print hundreds of vaccines per day.

This is not the first time a vaccine has been 3D printed, and with the same patch structure housing microneedles. The novelty here lies in the fact that it is possible to store vaccines at room temperature. This last point responds to a major problem concerning the transport and conservation of vaccines. A large part of traditional vaccines, including RNA vaccines, must be stored at low temperature, which complicates their transportation and storage in areas that are difficult to access, such as deserts, war zones, etc.

The project objective was to respond to the problem of Ebola-type epidemics by transporting printers to the region concerned in order to rapidly vaccinate the population. With the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic and issues regarding access to vaccination and vaccine stability, the team reoriented the project to produce RNA (mRNA) vaccines to fight against the disease. Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a molecule found in all cells of the body. Within each cell, the information encoded in the mRNA is read and converted into protein. In the case of Covid-19 vaccines, the mRNA is converted into the S (Spike) protein, which is also present on the envelope of the virus responsible for Covid-19, thus triggering an immune response when infected with the disease.