Researchers aim to develop sustainable Covid-19 vaccine delivery

To help prepare for a potential vaccine for Covid-19, researchers are launching a new project in India to help engineer an efficient and sustainable delivery mechanism.

If a Covid-19 vaccine is developed, scientists and countries will still face challenges in distributing that vaccine globally. Universal vaccine access is a major challenge due to the lack of robust cold-chains, particularly affecting low-income countries.

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization estimates that only 10% of health care facilities in the world’s poorest countries have a reliable electricity supply while in some countries less than 5% of health centres have vaccine-qualified refrigerators.

Now, researchers from the University of Birmingham and Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, will collaborate with non-profit commercial and academic partners to begin investigating the scale of challenge involved in distributing a potentially temperature-sensitive Covid-19 vaccine.

Backed by the Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation, the researchers will examine the challenges in developing an efficient vaccine delivery system, focusing on infrastructure across different countries and the resources needed.

In India, research led by Centre for Environment Education, and supported by commercial partners such as Zanotti (a part of the Daikin Group), Sure Chill and Nexleaf Analytics, will begin examining the challenges related to infrastructure when developing sufficient cold-chain capabilities.

Shubhashis Dey, associate director of Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation commented: “Covid-19 related mass immunization requirements offer us an opportunity to not only increase our vaccine production, but also create a robust logistics cold chain system that can handle the country’s overall vaccine needs. The vaccination program will require millions of citizens of all age group to be vaccinated within a short span of time. Our effort is designed to help India overcome this massive logistic challenge sustainably and create a model of global adoption.”

Researchers at the University of Birmingham and Heriot-Watt University are already exploring how ‘Community Cooling Hubs’ can integrate food cold chains with other cold-dependent services such as community health facilities, social facilities and even emergency services.

They hope their research can help develop a short-to-medium term exit solution to deliver a Covid-19 vaccine in an efficient manner. More so, their work could create a long-term contingency framework through the establishment of logistics specifically for medicine, blood and vaccines.

Toby Peters, professor of Cold Economy at the University of Birmingham, said: “Universal vaccine access is already a major challenge. With Covid-19, rapid mass immunisation will probably be required; maintaining a continuous cold chain to rapidly transport and deliver Covid-19 vaccines to all communities, many where electricity supply and cooling infrastructure is often non-existent or unreliable, will be a daunting task. 

“Given most of the technologies deployed today will still be in operation in the next decade, the emergence of sustainable and off-grid cold-chain devices allows us the opportunity to create sustainable solutions for Covid-19 vaccine deployment that also can deliver resilient and sustainable health cold-chain systems as a lasting legacy.”

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that a lack of effective cold-chain results in 1.5 million deaths each year from vaccine-preventable diseases. More so, WHO estimates that 25% of some vaccines are wasted every year due to temperature control and logistics failure.

Professor Peters added: “Ultimately, we need a global effort to prepare the vaccine and in parallel a global strategy to develop the appropriate sustainable and legacy equitable cold chains and achieve this with minimum environmental impact.

“Out-of-the-box thinking is needed if we are to define sustainable and inclusive solutions that can be delivered quickly and at scale to beat this pandemic and unlock connections between Covid-19 vaccine deployment, sustainable cold chain and development of clean energy infrastructure.”