Breath freshners melt in the mouth.  If life saving vaccines can also melt in the mouth many babies would be happy. One needs an appropriate bio-material to form the coating – containing the vaccine.

A pharmaceutical firm is in possession of a rotavirus vaccine that is stable at room temperature. It was looking for a delivery vehicle to administer the vaccine. Word got passed on to seven university undergraduate biomedical engineering students who were ready to participate.

They looked for a product resembling breath-freshening strips to deliver the vaccine. The (Johns Hopkins) university staff has now, applied for a provisional patent.

Normally stomach acids would dissolve the coating. Environment of the small intestine is chemically neutral. A protective coating devise that would remain intact when exposed to stomach acid was required. Further harsh solvent and high temperatures would destroy the vaccine.

The project was funded by a lab and by a $16,000 E-Team grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Association in USA. A Professor entrusted this project to seven students. ‘They have delivered the kind of results that even seasoned professionals might not have delivered’ said the Chief Scientific Officer of the pharma firm. Animal testing could begin later this year.

The student team fabricated a thin film that would melt quickly in a baby's mouth, prompting the child to swallow the vaccine. The dissolved medication is coated with a material to protect it in the child's stomach. This coating is also designed to release the vaccine in the small intestine, where it should trigger an immune response to prevent a rotavirus infection.

Rotavirus is a common cause of severe diarrhoea and vomiting in children. It is said that about 600,000 deaths occur annually - most of these in developing nations, where timely medical services to treat intestinal distress are not advantageously available. Rotavirus vaccine to prevent this illness is currently produced in a liquid or freeze-dried form that must be chilled for transport and in storage. It makes it very expensive for use in impoverished areas.

In addition, babies sometimes spit out the ‘expensive’ medicine in liquid form. It is less likely to occur with a strip that sticks to and dissolves on the tongue in less than a minute.

"What the students have accomplished is a way to incorporate a pH-responsive polymer system that works with an oral quick-dissolving thin film," the CSO added. "It's still very early in the process, but the pieces they've come up with have been very encouraging.”

To address the drawbacks of the liquid vaccine, the students developed a thin film delivery system that would be easy to store and transport and would not require refrigeration. Further refinement is needed to maintain the viability of the vaccine.

(Team leader Yu, who is from Shreveport, La., and the other team leader, Rohan Agrawal of Tampa, Fla., have been accepted into the biomedical engineering master's degree program at Johns Hopkins. The other members of the team were Yang Li, a senior from San Antonio, Texas; Dhanya Rangaraj, a junior from Foothill Ranch, Calif.; Jonathan Yen, a freshman from Hillsborough, Calif.; Shaoyi Zhang, a freshman from San Jose, Calif.; and Judy Qiu, a freshman from Potomac Falls, Va.)