Medicine: A No-Shot Vaccine

If you've popped a quick-melting Listerine strip into your mouth lately, you may have tasted the next big idea in vaccines. Johns Hopkins University just announced that a team of biomedical-engineering students working with Aridis Pharmaceuticals has tapped breath-mint technology as a potentially revolutionary way to inoculate infants and children.

Any parent can spot the benefits: less painful than an injection, more effective than a spilling spoonful of liquid, these cellophane-like strips are simply placed on the tongue, where they melt in seconds and are easily swallowed. The real boost is to the developing world. Most vaccines must be shipped, stored and administered in a consistent "cold chain," which is difficult and costly for aid organizations working in the heat of Africa. Last year Aridis, a San Jose, Calif., biotechnology company, developed a vaccine for rota-virus—a diarrheal disease that kills some 600,000 children worldwide each year—that works at room temperature, and approached Johns Hopkins with the breath-strip idea. Undergraduates there, working under biomaterials professor Hai-Quan Mao, seem to have solved the technical problems of making an advanced film strong enough to protect a weakened rotavirus strain as it passes through the stomach's acid, but delicate enough to release it once inside the lower intestine, where it's most effective.

Aridis recently received news that it will get $2 million in funding from the PATH organization, via the Gates Foundation. With further testing and refinement, it will be four to six years before the vaccine strips are put into use.

—Nick Summers

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