Oxford Researchers Develop Method To Identify Fake Covid-19 Vaccines

Study in UK: The Serum Institute of India also participated in the research where the scientists found an innovative method to identify the fake Covid-19 vaccines.

The University Of Oxford researchers participated in a study in collaboration with other researchers to find a new method to identify a fake Covid-19 vaccine.

The other collaborators included Agilent Technologies, University of East London, bioMérieux, France, Serum Institute of India, WHO, Geneva, and STFC, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

The Vaccine Identify Evaluation (VIE) Collaboration is developing tests to detect false vaccines in the supply chain.

VIE team leader, Professor Paul Newton of the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, University of Oxford, said, "This innovative approach gives a relatively simple and accessible method for the local screening of vaccine labels and liquids for authenticity and detecting falsified vaccines when fake labels have been used. For implementation in supply chains, joined up systems for access to MALDI-ToF vaccine label and liquid reference libraries will be needed, but such libraries are already available for bacteria."

Study co-leader, Professor Nicole Zitzmann of the Department of Biochemistry and Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery, University of Oxford, said, "We need this method to be useful everywhere in the world, and particularly in low- and middle-income countries. This is why we developed it for two different MALDI-ToF mass spectrometers, the bioMérieux VITEK® MS and the Bruker Sirius, which -between them- are available in almost every country in the world, where they are being used for clinical microbiology. A particular thank you goes to bioMérieux for all their support and the loan of their instrument for this development work."

Professor James McCullagh of the Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford who is one of the study co-leaders, said, "With an increasing global reliance on vaccines to maintain population health, and the rise in substandard and falsified vaccines, this method is both timely and addresses an important global need. I am delighted to see that our recently published method using mass spectrometry with machine learning is already being applied to innovate non-invasive detection of falsified vaccines."

New Method To Identify Fake Covid-19 Vaccines

The new method analyses the vaccine vial label and its adhesive. The study has revealed that the new technique can also differentiate between genuine medicine in the vaccine and the falsified vaccine. The World Health Organization (WHO) has also commented that in low and middle-income countries, around 10.5% of medicines are falsified and created by criminals which threatens global health.

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