Students devise an oral rotavirus vaccine

A group of Johns Hopkins undergraduate biomedical engineering students have developed a rotavirus vaccine for infants that dissolves in the mouth like a popular breath freshener.

The seven-student team made a thin film that should 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 and release it in the small intestine, where it should trigger an immune response to rotavirus.

Rotavirus is a common cause of severe diarrhoea and vomiting in children, leading to about 600,000 deaths annually. Most occur in developing nations, where medical services are not widely available.

Rotavirus vaccine is currently produced in a liquid or freeze-dried form that must be chilled for transport and storage, making it very expensive for use in impoverished areas. Newborns sometimes spit out the liquid, a problem that is less likely to occur with a strip that sticks to and dissolves on the tongue in less than a minute.

The thin film delivery system would be easy to store and transport and would not require refrigeration.

"The idea is that you would place one of these dissolving strips on the infant's tongue," said Hai-Quan Mao, the team's Johns Hopkins faculty advisor.

"Because the strips are in a solid form, they would cost much less to store and transport than the liquid vaccine. We wanted this to be as simple and as inexpensive as possible."

The student inventors found the hands-on assignment to be a valuable part of their engineering education.

"This was a really good experience," said Christopher Yu, the student co-team leader.

"When you run into problems in a project like this, you have to think hard about how to solve them or work around them. It's much more rewarding than a basic textbook problem, where there's an expected answer and you don't necessarily have to think as broadly or as creatively."