University of Oxford Researchers Validate Method to Identify Fake Vaccines

According to an Aug. 29 news release from the University of Oxford, a new study shows that researchers have developed and validated a method to distinguish authentic and falsified vaccines using instruments originally developed for identify bacteria in hospital microbiology laboratories.

The news release states “The global population is increasingly reliant on vaccines to maintain population health with billions of doses used annually in immunization programs worldwide. The vast majority of vaccines are of excellent quality. However, a rise in substandard and falsified vaccines threaten global public health. Besides failing to treat the disease for which they were intended, these can have serious health consequences, including death, and reduce confidence in vaccines. Unfortunately, there is currently no global infrastructure in place to monitor supply chains using screening methods developed to identify ineffective vaccines.”

Further, “The method is based on matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation-mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS), a technique used to identify the components of a sample by giving the constituent molecules a charge and then separating them. The MALDI-MS analysis is then combined with open-source machine learning. This provides a reliable multi-component model which can differentiate authentic and falsified vaccines, and is not reliant on a single marker or chemical constituent.”

The method successfully distinguished between a range of actual vaccines and solutions commonly used in fake vaccines, such as sodium chloride.

The study is entitled, “Using matrix assisted laser desorption ionisation mass spectrometry combined with machine learning for vaccine authenticity screening” and is published in has been published in npj Vaccines.

This research was funded by two anonymous philanthropic families, the Oak Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The study was led by a team at the Mass Spectrometry Research Facility in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford and was part of a research consortium involving teams from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory of STFC at Harwell and the Departments of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Nuffield Department of Medicine Centre for Global Health Research at the University of Oxford.