Overview

In our world, billions of people are suffering from contagions. However, only a fraction of contagions can be prevented by the existing vaccines. The disadvantages of traditional vaccines, which are bothered to produced and purified and has strict requirements about temperature, limit their usage especially in developing countries.

Fig1. hard shipping in some area

This year, our project focused on a revolutionary vaccine delivery. We bring a fresh Medication into the world which is an in situ expression system. Our practice of this concept is a biological transdermal vaccine patch called T-vaccine. We chose Bacillus subtilis as chassis to establish the band-aid secreting fresh vaccines. The new vaccine consist of four engineering B.subtilis, each of which carried a gene circuit independently.

Fig2. block-based design

With an excellent transdermal peptide TD1, three of the engineering B.subtilis could express a series of fusion proteins (the antigen and 2 kinds of adjuvants) which could penetrate the skin and work as traditional vaccine molecules. The fourth bacteria are our “reporter” which would notify users when the band-aid is working well and the patch can be pasted or tore off. Moreover, we designed a reliable suicide system in Bacillus subtilis to prevent it from spreading for the very first time in iGEM.

T-vaccine has great advantages in transportation which can be stored from minus 20 to 60 Celsius. With T-vaccine, we can reach every remote corner of the world and help eliminate contagions from our world. Also it is proven that transdermal vaccine is an efficient and effective way for a variety of pathogens such as: tuberculosis, anthrax, hepatitis B and so on. Last but not least, we have created a world free from needles. Given all these advantages, T-vaccine is expected to be a promising vaccine research and development direction.