Scientists report successfully freeze-drying specialized liposomes that could be developed for use in future vaccines.

Freeze-drying is a method for removing water from a product. First, you freeze the item you’re trying to dehydrate, causing any water in it to become ice. Then, you remove the ice through a process called sublimation, in which ice turns directly into vapor under low pressure.

In a new study, scientists report that they have successfully freeze-dried a liposome-based liquid vaccine formula that could be developed for potential use in COVID-19 vaccines.

A vaccine that employs the freeze-dried liposomes is still a long way off. But if developed successfully, dehydrated doses could be shipped and stored at room temperature, eliminating logistical problems associated with some of the most popular existing vaccines for the disease.

The findings will be published in Science Advances on Dec. 1, with University at Buffalo biomedical engineering researchers Jonathan Lovell and Moustafa Mabrouk as the senior and first authors, respectively.

«At the time we started this project, the first COVID-19 vaccines were just getting rolled out, and there was a lot of news about how they needed ultra-cold storage, and how that was a huge logistical challenge. Especially in low- and middle-income countries, it may not always be feasible to have that type of refrigeration infrastructure. So we started to look at whether we could make a thermostable COVID-19 vaccine using a liposome-based vaccine platform that we worked on previously,» says Lovell, PhD, SUNY Empire Innovation Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB.

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Materials provided by University at Buffalo. Original written by Charlotte Hsu. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.