The COVID-19 outbreak has undoubtedly turned the world upside down and exposed all the flaws in our healthcare system. After a year of this pandemic, we all thought that vaccines were the ultimate solution. However, having licensed vaccines is not enough to achieve global control of the pandemic. Almost all available vaccines must be stored at low temperatures in very expensive equipment. This, added to the logistics involved in distributing these biological products, represents a huge barrier, especially for people who are in difficult-to-access regions of the country, where they can have these high-tech equipment or a robust health system that facilitates conditions for vaccination is almost impossible.

Lecchain, is a candidate for an oral vaccine against COVID-19, and was born as a solution to these problems. It has a formulation with thermotolerant properties based on recombinant protein technology with a modular design. Its design is given so that it is easily adapted to the production of other thermotolerant vaccines and not only for SARS-CoV-2. With Lecchain we will have taken the first step towards the production of heat resistant vaccines that do not depend on an expensive and complex cold chain. In this way, they will be accessible and will allow us to reach the most remote places not only in the country, but in all those where the correct distribution of vaccines is not very viable.
The team that develops this project is made up of 15 students from the Bioengineering, Electronic Engineering and Computer Science majors at UTEC and they are about to participate in the iGEM Design League, one of the largest international Synthetic Biology competitions.

If you want to know more about the project, you can write to:

igem@utec.edu.pe
https://instagram.com/lecchain
https://www.linkedin.com/company/lecchain-peru/
https://twitter.com/lecchain

More news