Catalent Inc (CTLT)

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Progress on MACIVIVA Project presented by consortium partner Upperton. "Spray drying of virosomes to produce stable vaccines"

Vaccines are poorly accessible in developing countries
Vaccines require cold-chain storage and are often delivered by injection, which is undesirable, less safe and more expensive to administer.
Developing thermostable solid form vaccines through non-invasive routes may represent a long-term global solution to the vaccination
challenge (Amorij, 2008)

Virosomes are an efficient vaccine delivery system
Virosomes are spherical, unilamellar lipid-based carriers, intercalated with functional glycoproteins to reflect the natural virus, however the lack
of viral RNA means there is no risk of infection (Figure 1). Virosomes can be tagged with different antigens and adjuvants, meaning they can
be tailored to target different viruses, and offer increased immunogenicity over inactivated viruses.
Currently, virosomal influenza vaccines are only available in liquid form (Amorij, 2008).

Spray drying can produce dry powders for a range of dosage forms, including inhaled or nasal drug delivery.
A dry powder is formed when a liquid feed solution or suspension is atomised using a spray nozzle, and rapidly dried using hot air. However,
while the drying process is gentle due to evaporative cooling, there is still the potential to stress and inactivate vaccine components. It has
been found that subunit and live-attenuated vaccines (and other delicate molecules such as proteins) can be protected during processing b
by incorporating them in an amorphous sugar matrix, which also offers longer term stability during storage (Kanojia, 2016)

A method has been developed to produce a powder form of virosome based influenza vaccine using spray-drying.
Formulations have been optimised for oral and nasal delivery.


http://www.upperton.com/images/pdf/t10.pdf