In this current era, we suffer from COVID-19, a global pandemic that has infected over six hundred million people around the world.Despite most infections are mild, it is extremely contagious. Symptoms include coughing, trouble breathing, persistent pain or pressure in chest etc.
In order to deal with this crisis, our company has come up with a solution. Current methods of vaccination, such as Antiviral vaccines, messenger RNA vaccines, and subunit vaccines require delivering antigen to host cells, which can lead to side effects. Due to the concerns of spike protein, which is produced to trigger immune responses, we decided to go with a concept that has been put into practice before. Inspired by two teams in the past, team Mingdao in2021 and team TUDelft in 2020, our project is about phage.In our project ,we chose to seek for a safer vector, for the purpose of transfer and express antigen gene in the non-human cells in the human body. For example, E-coli living in human intestines can be helpful to express antigen proteins and induce intestine immune response.
Phaccine is a concept in which we use bio-engineered phage to infect E-coli, creating antigen hence triggering the immune system. Bacteriophage, also known as phage, is a virus that attacks and destroys bacteria. Bacteriophages do not target bacteria in general. Each phage targets a specific type of bacterium, whilst ignoring the rest. In our scenario, we use phage to target E-coli. With Phaccine, we can provide a new model for future research, in order to create antigen. We also have certain advantages other traditional vaccines don’t have, such as easier to preserve, lower price, and more user friendly.
With our project still being a model, it could potentially be used to change the whole concept of vaccines existing. By using phage, which carries the specific gene that can produce antigen through E-coli, to trigger the immune system, Phaccine will be one of the cheapest vaccines available on the current market, due to the low cost and the ability to mass-produce. However, we chose to set our sights on entering the stock farming industries and the remote regions because of the inconvenience they share on accessing the market.
According to the C.O.A(Council of Agriculture), we have approximately 55 millions of broilers and 5 millions of pigs in Taiwan during the quarter 2 of 2022.With each livestocks costs around 10 NTD per shot, we can significantly decrease the heavy loading with our product due to the low cost of manufacture. Despite having plenty of competitors, we believe that our project can bring something new to the stock farming industries and the remote regions. For the remote regions,our product is far easier to acquire than current vaccines, since our product doesn’t require to be preserved at a specific temperature. Furthermore, since the remote region usually lacks medical resources, thus being unable to be vaccinated ,our product doesn’t need professionals with injecting. For stock farming industries, we hope to improve the current technique of vaccination by offering our product. Without the need of temperature maintenance, our product can be much easier to conserve than existing oral vaccines. Additionally, it is necessary to have a vaccination team to help with vaccinating domestic animals, but with Phaccine, the workers can simply feed them.
Since our project can almost guarantee that it is cheap and easy to preserve, our project is most likely going to become the most user friendly product on the market. With the vaccine market being saturated, we can provide a new way that differs from the current method, helping the people who are in need of our project. We vision that we can enter the market under the banner of user friendly within a couple of years.
In order to know what we can provide to society better, we did a SWOT analysis to understand what our strengths and weaknesses are against some of the most common vaccines.
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Our short term goal is to cooperate with biotechnology companies, produce small amounts of vaccines, and adjust depending on the customer’s feedback.The biggest problem with our project is that we are still a prototype, which means we might not have the credit for companies to invest in us. However, we have sent our project’s proposal to several different companies, waiting for their responses.
For our mid-term goal, we will seek for companies that can mass-produce our project,once we get the certification we need. We suppose once they recognize our project’s capability, they can fund us with our project’s production, selling it to potential customers in Taiwan. Above that, we are hoping to sign a contract with livestock farms for further corporations.
Last, for a long term goal, we seek a chance to become the mainstream product in our targeted market. While being recognized by word of mouth, we have a chance to compete or even replace current methods of vaccination, thus getting the opportunities to access the global market.