A fairly low-tech piece of equipment designed at the University of B.C. is helping save lives on the other side of the world.
Vaccines must be kept at between two and eight degrees Celsius or they can spoil, rendering them ineffective, and storing anything at a constant temperature can be a challenge in remote areas with limited access to refrigeration. Approached with this problem by the Clinton Health Access Initiative, a team at UBC found a solution — a low-cost, low-tech cooler that is able to maintain vaccines at an optimal temperature for up to seven days.
“Vaccines save hundreds of thousands of lives, but distribution in developing countries is a major global health problem,” Goran Fernlund, associate professor of materials engineering, who led the team, said in a press release. “When being delivered, vaccines might be put on the back of a motorcycle in a Styrofoam container, and they would often get too warm or even too cold because they’re right against an ice pack. When nurses inject the vaccine five or six days later, they have no way of knowing if it’s still effective.”
The solution designed by the UBC team is made up of several compartments within an insulated box. The vaccines are stored in a central compartment surrounded by a thin layer of insulation. Two sides of the central compartment are cooled by ice packs while the two other sides are exposed to ambient temperatures through contact with the exterior walls. The team carefully designed the size and shape of the various cavities to keep temperatures in the vaccine storage compartment within the optimal range for up to seven days.
A grant from the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the team was able to successfully pilot the cooler in Mozambique where it was used to safely transport vaccines into the field. Under testing, vaccines stayed below eight degrees in 43-degree heat and above two degrees in colder 10-degree conditions.
“With this cold box, we have the first tool of its kind that can transport large quantities of vaccines safely to the health facilities and ultimately to the child,” said Lise Ellyin, country director for the initiative in Mozambique. “It’s an example of the public-private partnerships that CHAI and Mozambique’s’s Ministry of Health engage in with institutions like UBC to improve the country’s health care system.”
The initiative works to strengthen the capabilities of government and the private sector in developing countries to create and sustain high-quality health systems that can succeed without assistance.
The UBC team included Navid Zobeiry and Casey Keulen, research associates at the university’s composites research network.
“In engineering, we love to think about complex problems and complex solutions,” Zobeiry said. “But vaccine distribution in low-resource settings needs a simple solution that needs only ice — not refrigeration or high-tech apps or Bluetooth or Wifi.”
The team is now openly sharing its design in the hopes of finding a manufacturer to build and distribute the coolers more widely.
