Understanding Virus and Viral Vaccine Development Using Multi Spectral Advanced Nano-Tracking Analyzer (NTA)

AS the world today faces one of the biggest pandemics in the form of COVID-19, a wide range of candidate vaccines based on potential tools like viral vectors or virus like particles (VLP’s) are under development with the aim of protecting us against the life-threatening disease.

- Dr Namrata Jain, Kanika Thakur, Dr Jeffrey Bodycomb, Dr Rajeev Gautam, Dr John Kiran Anthony

For vaccines, thermostability is the key to successful global immunization programs as it can have a significant impact on the continuous cold-chain maintenance logistics, as well as on the vaccine potency. The stability of such a vaccine comes under increasing regulatory scrutiny, due to its potential effect on immunogenicity and the difficulties involved in its characterisation.

In order to comprehensively characterise stability and aggregation of vaccines, this article demonstrates the advantages of Multispectral Advanced Nanoparticle Tracking Analyser (ViewSizer™ 3000) from HORIBA Scientific. The ViewSizer 3000 can be used to understand the insights of particle sizing and viral titer [1] in the range of 10 nm to 15 μm. The combined capabilities of particle visualization, particle size and concentration measurements enable unmatched characterization and real-time monitoring of common kinetic processes such as dissolution of active pharmaceutical ingredients, self-assembly of polymers, crystallization of food and pharmaceutical products, aggregation of proteins, and particle agglomeration.

Vaccine Development

The ViewSizer 3000 can assist manufacturers to optimize the product shelf-life by evaluating the degree and the rate of aggregate formation in virus or VLP’s preparation through an immediate and direct estimation of product purity and concentration. As the technology also allows particle visualization and sizing, additional nanoparticle quantification is made available in a very short time when compared to conventional Plague Assays (PA) technique. For example, Figure 2