Nanoparticles Being Used to Protect Vaccine and Sperm During Intrauterine Vaccination

Researchers with the University of Saskatchewan are exploring the potential value of nanoparticles to protect and enhance the effectiveness of vaccines administered with sperm during artificial insemination.

The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization and the College of Pharmacy and Nutrition at the University of Saskatchewan are evaluating the use of nanoparticles to protect fertility and maintain the effectiveness of intrauterine vaccines administered to sows and gilts during AI.

Ramin Mohammadi, a Ph.D. candidate and a member of the Drug Discovery and Development Research Group in the College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, explains, the goal is to mitigate degradation of the vaccine, enhance its effectiveness and protect the sperm by encapsulating the vaccine along with oil and water adjuvants.

Clip-Ramin Mohammadi-University of Saskatchewan:

Nanoparticles are going to encapsulate the oil and water adjuvants so it's not going to be spermicidal.We've done several trials with the nanoparticles and right now we are playing around with trying to use different techniques to incorporate different flavours of oil and water adjuvants into the nanoparticles.
Each of them have their own specific chemistry so figuring out how to get the adjuvants inside that nanoparticle with the other parts of the vaccine, it's really key.

We've had some very exciting success so far, but there are still others that we're in the process of testing.We would like to do a full panel of these nanoparticles, select all the best ones with the best response and then start moving into challenge studies which is kind of at the next level.

Mohammadi says preliminary results are showing passively that a single administration of the vaccine delivered with the oil and water adjuvants is possibly more effective than two vaccinations where the adjuvants are not included, suggesting this might lead to a single dose vaccine.