A Vaccine Coated Floss as a Novel Vaccination Platform

Vaccines are one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to save lives worldwide. Successful vaccination campaigns have helped eradicate certain infectious diseases from many parts of the world. The field of vaccination, however, is still riddled with the finding simpler approaches enabling vaccination at home. This is because administration of vaccines requires trained medical personnel and vaccines are required to be stored under cold temperatures preventing the possibility of immunization at home. In this study, we introduce for the very first time the use of floss as a novel vaccine delivery device. We first characterize the ability to coat floss with vaccine formulation. We show that the floss can be easily coated by pipetting a vaccine formulation on its surface and that the coatings achieved were stable. Next, we show the versatility of the coating technique by coating different vaccine formulations (such as subunit antigen, inactivated virus, peptide based universal flu vaccine, mRNA) on floss. We then analyze the delivery efficiency of the coated floss and show that coated floss can successfully deliver the vaccine formulation to the junctional epithelium of the gingival crevice in mice. Next, we demonstrate that even after unrestricted access to food and water, the vaccine administered through coated floss was present at the junctional epithelium of the mice for extended period of times. Furthermore, we show that delivery of vaccine formulation with coated floss induced a strong antibody response in mice and the mice were protected against a lethal influenza virus challenge. We also studied the effect of dose given through floss to fine tune the immune response in mice. Lastly, we established that using pipetted based coating method the floss could be coated with multiple vaccine formulations. Delivery of multiple vaccine formulations to the junctional epithelium using coated floss was shown to induce a strong antibody response against delivered vaccine. To summarize, we developed a simple vaccine delivery system based on floss. This is a first of its kind study that introduces use of floss as a novel vaccine delivery platform. The simplicity of this system with additional engineering can open doors for the potential of using vaccine coated floss for vaccinating oneself at the comfort of their homes without any assistance from trained personnel.

Embargo status: Restricted until 01/2174. To request the author grant access, click on the PDF link to the left.