The study, released in April, enriched cell-free extracts with cellular membranes and found it yielded higher concentrations of needed proteins. This process solves one of the most significant and persistent problems with cell-free vaccine production, potentially increasing access to life-saving medications. Embracing this method could help fight future pandemics or even prevent them altogether.

The iVAX Platform

This breakthrough comes at the heels of another innovation from Northwestern researchers. In February, the team revealed a new vaccine manufacturing platform called in vitro conjugate vaccine expression (iVAX). The iVAX method uses freeze-dried cell-free components, extending vaccine shelf lives and making them easier to transport and administer.

The freeze-dried vaccine components remain shelf-stable for six months or more. When health care workers are ready to administer them, they add a drop of water, creating the vaccine on demand. This ensures that people in even the most remote locations can receive life-saving medication before it expires.

iVAX can work with other recent MedTech advances to expand vaccine distribution. For example, health management platforms have reached out to millions of patients to encourage vaccine engagement amid the pandemic. These systems could drive more people to seek vaccines that iVAX then makes available.

Further Increasing Vaccine Availability

The iVAX platform can dramatically improve vaccine availability, but the researchers’ discovery takes it even further. While iVAX showed tremendous promise for extending vaccines’ shelf life, it wasn’t as affordable or fast as the scientists wanted. The new membrane-enriching system solves both of those issues.

The original iVAX system produced one dose an hour at the cost of around $5 per dose. Since the new enriching process increases yields, it’s also more cost-effective, costing roughly $1 per dose. Vaccine manufacturers could use this system to produce more vaccines at a time and do so more affordably.

Cell-free synthetic biology failed to produce high yields until now because it’s challenging to activate membrane-dependent functions without a cell membrane. This new system works by enriching cell-free concentrations with vesicles of broken-up membranes. The enriched components can then perform membrane-dependent functions far more efficiently, producing more of the proteins vaccines need.

A New Age in Medtech

With this new process, the iVAX platform could produce vaccines that are shelf-stable, affordable and abundant. More groundbreaking systems like these are emerging as medtech advances, promising better health care. The industry is experiencing something of a renaissance in response to the pandemic.

These new vaccine production methods aren’t the only advances to appear recently. Hospitals have started using robots for remote patient monitoring and IoT-based asset tracking. Some nations have adopted blockchain-based vaccine tracking to slow the pandemic’s spread as economies reopen.

The pandemic has highlighted where the medical sector has fallen short, and medtech has responded in force. Advances in these technologies seem to be happening at a record pace, and adoption is keeping up. While COVID-19 has pushed the world’s health care systems to extremes, they’ve rebounded and are now armed with cutting-edge technologies.

Medtech Is Making the World a Safer Place

These innovations paint a bright picture of the health landscape of tomorrow. With more research, advancement and adoption, vaccine development and deployment will reach new heights. Health care as a whole will become more agile, affordable and accessible thanks to these breakthroughs.

It may not be long until another discovery pushes these findings even further. Medtech is on the verge of a revolution, and the world will be a healthier place because of it.