A medical worker administers polio drops to an infant at a hospital during the pulse polio immunization programme
A medical worker administers polio drops to an infant at a hospital during the pulse polio immunization programme REUTERS/Jayanta Dey

Polio is nearly an eradicated disease with only a few hundred cases reported each year. The polio vaccine, developed about 50 years ago, is credited for this. Researchers in Britain are now developing a synthetic polio vaccine. It works like a vaccine made from live, weakened virus, except that it contains synthetic particles inside a viral shell.

Dave Stuart, a professor of structural biology at Oxford University and life sciences director at Diamond Light Source, a light facility in which X-rays are spectroscopy techniques are used to make synthetic vaccines, said that man-made polio vaccine could eventually eliminate pockets of infection in nature as the microbe dies. The man-made vaccine mimics the structure of the polio virus so it would be able to raise a strong immune response in humans. It does not contain any pathogen either, so there is no risk of exposure, even in the case of an accidental release during the manufacturing process. If the vaccine is not a virus then the virus is not produced and therefore doesn’t circulate in the environment.

The hope is that eventually the virus will be eliminated. Then vaccination can stop because the virus would be completely eradicated. The new synthetic polio vaccine is awaiting effectiveness studies. It would be easy to make and store. The work was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in California. The hope is that the new approach addresses some of the shortcomings in an existing vaccine and eliminate polio altogether. The World Health Organisation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are providing a $674,000 grant for the cause.

The battle against polio is very close to being won. Just 350 cases were reported in 2014, and most were from Pakistan. The list indicates eradicating the disease is proving difficult because in a few individuals, the vaccine can set up an infection in the gut that then enables a reactivated virus to pass out of the body and spread to other unvaccinated people. If the virus particle has no genetic machinery, this transmission route is closed. The synthetic vaccine contains no genome—it is virus-free. It is made like a super chemical, a complicated chemical that assembles itself to look like a virus but which has no way of replicating.

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