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 for the very first time in iGEM. So it would be OK when the patches are thrown away into the environment.

Cheap and convenient, we created a world free from needles.