The Sino tech Health project "Microcarriers for Vaccine Production" won the second prize

On October 13th, sino-tech healthy participating project - "Localization and Innovative Product Development of Polymer Microcarriers for Vaccine Mass Production" - won the second prize of the "Angel Fund" project in Changchun New Area in 2022 after expert evaluation in the preliminary and final rounds.

Microcarriers are polymer microspheres with a size of one hundred micrometers, and a surface area of one kilogram of microcarriers can reach the size of a tennis court. It is mainly used for large-scale cultivation of animal adherent cells. It is a key carrier material in the production process of cells, vaccines, or drugs for vaccine companies, biopharmaceutical companies, biological product companies, and universities or research institutes. At present, microcarriers mainly rely on imports and are expensive, which limits the research and production of vaccines by domestic enterprises and is one of the bottleneck technologies in China.

According to the market demand and technical barriers of domestic vaccine manufacturers, the project uses medical polymer materials such as dextran to study the oxidative crosslinking of materials and the corresponding spray drying technology and surface biological modification process, develop a series of cell microcarrier products, and establish a three-dimensional dynamic culture technology system of virus producing cells, so as to meet the application needs of efficient cell expansion and improved vaccine production capacity in the process of animal vaccine production. Through the development of this series of microcarriers, domestic substitution of glucan microcarrier products can be achieved, breaking foreign monopolies, reducing production costs for vaccine companies, improving production efficiency, and providing an important choice for the domestic vaccine market.

Microcarrier culture is currently recognized as the most promising large-scale animal cell culture technology, which is widely used in the production of rabies vaccine, poliomyelitis vaccine, influenza vaccine, COVID-19 inactivated vaccine, etc. The price of microcarrier products is approximately 200-300 yuan per gram, and the annual dosage of microcarriers is about 30-50Kg for general scale vaccine production enterprises in China, while the dosage for large vaccine enterprises is even higher. Therefore, domestic microcarrier replacement products and their upgraded products have huge market demand and important practical significance.