Efforts to improve vaccine stabilization heat up

Recent developments in biopreservation science and technology.

Efforts to improve vaccine stabilization heat up. When researchers tracked the temperature of hepatitis B vaccine being delivered to frigid, remote reaches of western China in 2007, they found vaccine vials spending a median time of more than four days below their freezing point of minus 0.5 degrees Celsius.

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v15/n11/full/nm1109-1232.html

 

Unlike other types of blood components, refrigeration of platelets leads to their rapid clearance from the circulation after transfusion.  Platelets must therefore be stored at room temperature, a serious limitation to their use for transfusions.  Viktoria Rumjantseva et al. now dissect two platelet clearance pathways by which exposed carbohydrate residues on platelets are recognized by receptors on liver macrophages and hepatocytes, which differentially control the clearance of short-term- and long-term- refrigerated platelets.

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v15/n11/full/nm.2030.html

 

Despite progress in teh biosensor field, a platform that allows the sensitive detection of disease-specific proteins in a diverse range of clinical samples such as saliva, serum and urine has proved elusive. Here, Richard Gaster and his colleagues introduce a magnetic nanosensing protein detection platform that offers quantitative multiplex protein detection at attomolar concentrations over a large linear dynamic range and in a range of biological fluids.

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v15/n11/full/nm.2032.html