Vaccine Design and Development

Cryo-EM is essential for rapid development of safe and effective vaccines at scale.

To rapidly develop safe and effective vaccines at scale, imaging techniques that provide the most comprehensive and confidence-inducing structural information across the vaccine discovery and development pipeline are essential. Cryo-EM is a powerful technique for the determination of 3D structures to optimize vaccine design and development, as well as for providing routine nanoparticle characterization during the vaccine design and development, formulation development, and drug manufacturing process validation, because cryo-EM is parsimonious in its material requirements, captures specimens in their native hydrated state, and is forgiving of heterogeneous mixtures of samples, eg when adjuvants are present.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the extraordinary role cryo-TEM has played in the structural characterization of the coronavirus spike protein and is rapidly becoming the technique of choice for characterizing mRNA vaccines due to the breadth of actionable information it provides. As a direct visualization method, cryo-TEM presents individual particles in a sample providing information on a range of characteristics, including homogeneity, size distribution, titer, particle morphology, structural integrity, purity and more.