ATLANTA – SEEDR L3C, an Atlanta-based solution and innovation design firm, has received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to redesign and reengineer cold-chain containers used in global and domestic vaccine and disease-monitoring programs. SEEDR will partner with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Georgia Tech Tennenbaum Institute (TI) on this project.
Countries and multinational aid agencies rely on these containers to maintain vaccines at required temperatures as they are shipped and delivered to children around the world. They also use the containers to transport specimens or other biological products such as blood back from the field to laboratories for diagnosis and epidemiological surveillance.
“From polio to measles to the H1N1 virus, this technology has the potential to enhance efforts to locate and eradicate the world’s most-threatening diseases,” said SEEDR Managing Director Michael Moreland.
The redesigned containers will use applied science developed by SEEDR technology partner Global Tech International (GTI). GTI is the inventor of Powder Impression Molding (PIM) and Molecular Modification Technology (MMT), both of which have found success in automotive and aerospace industries and have applications for the cold-chain containers.
The new containers have the potential to strengthen immunization and disease surveillance programs by reducing vaccine and specimen loss. In addition, these lighter and less-expensive containers offer substantial cost-savings potential. With approximately 135 million children born in 2009, global immunization efforts cost billions of dollars. The CDC Global Immunization Division alone will spend $170 million on such efforts this year.
Dr. Brent Burkholder, Director of the CDC Global Immunization Division, said he hopes the project can “protect the significant investment in costly vaccines, and, more importantly, to ensure the safety of those receiving immunizations.”
The SEEDR-led project is a unique combination of expertise from government, private enterprise, academia and philanthropy. “This type of public-private partnership facilitates the application of the most cutting-edge technologies to difficult and sometimes intractable public health problems,” said Dr. Victoria Gammino, project co-investigator and CDC epidemiologist.
GTI’s containers are built with recycled materials. This is attractive to the CDC, which is focused on delivering vaccines – an energy and resource-intensive effort — with a smaller environmental impact. Sue Gerber, CDC co-investigator for the project, noted that, “we have the opportunity to improve vaccine delivery capacity while reducing the environmental impact of the cold chain.”
Tennenbaum, the global enterprise and innovation think tank at Georgia Tech, is building a simulation model to measure the potential impact the containers will have on the costs and effectiveness of the vaccines.
