Summary:

Our innovation is a room temperature stable quick-dissolving oral thin film delivery system for vaccines that will make vaccinations almost as simple as freshening your breath. This delivery system exhibits many advantages not available in current products: improved patient compliance, improved bioavailability, reduction in the costs associated with storage, distribution, handling and administration.

Our present focus is to develop the oral thin film delivery system for rotavirus vaccination in underdeveloped areas, as rotavirus is the leading cause of gastroenteritis infecting virtually every child in the world resulting in severe diarrhea and death in approximately 600,000 children each year. However, this oral thin film delivery system can be adapted for other therapeutics, not just vaccines.

Our oral thin films combined with a stabilized rotavirus vaccine will be a more practical and attractive alternative to current vaccines because of its simpler storage and distribution requirements. For example, cold chain requirements and excess water weight would be eliminated making transportation and storage more manageable and less costly. Furthermore, oral thin films are simpler to administer to infants than traditional vaccination methods: tablets, liquid droplets, injections. Mass immunization becomes much more feasible with a cheaper, easier and potentially more effective method of vaccination.

Current rotavirus vaccines are delivered in liquid form, which is not sufficiently storage stable and difficult to administer to infants. Unfortunately, these liquid vaccines can be easily regurgitate by infants resulting in inadequate dosing. Furthermore, they require relatively large secondary packaging and must be constantly refrigerated to maintain bioactivity, severly significantly increasing costs. Thus, it is uncertain whether these vaccines will reach children of developing areas, where it is needed the most.