But a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Vaxess Technologies plans to sidestep this common fear by abandoning stainless steel needles and switching to silk.
The silk protein acts as a preservative, so there’s no need to keep it on ice at a doctor’s office. ‘It’s similar to what happens when you freeze something,’ said Vaxess founder and chief executive Michael Schrader. ‘It’s room-temperature freezing.’ In testing, Vaxess found that flu vaccines stored in a silk patch at room temperature remained viable three years later.
No more need for a ‘cold chain’, the costly network of refrigerators between manufacturing plants and medical clinics required by so many vaccines. Indeed, there’d be no need to get vaccinated at a clinic at all. Patients could vaccinate themselves.
‘We would mail you a patch,’ said Schrader. ‘It looks like a nicotine patch, only much smaller. You wear the patch for five minutes, then take it off and throw it away.’
Having completed a successful phase one clinical trial of the silk patches in late 2022, Schrader hopes to bring them to market by 2028.
It’s hardly the sort of product we’d usually associate with silk, the tough, luxurious, and luminous fabric that has delighted people for at least 5,000 years. But silk is proving to be far more valuable than its early Chinese cultivators could have imagined.
Much of what we now understand about silk was discovered at Silklab, a branch of the department of engineering at Tufts University in Medford, a suburb of Boston. Here a visitor encounters silken lenses that project words and images when bathed in laser light; surgical gloves coated in silk that display a warning if they’ve been contaminated with pathogens; tiny silken screws that are strong enough to repair a broken bone, only to dissolve entirely once the injury is healed.
For Silklab director Fiorenzo Omenetto, silk is not a fashion statement. It’s a set of microscopic Lego blocks that he and his colleagues are pulling apart and reassembling into an array of unexpected products.
‘We make everything,’ said Omenetto. ‘We make plastics, we make edible electronics, we make coatings for food.’
Silk isn’t everything at Silklab. Omenetto and his colleagues experiment with a variety of similar molecules, known as structural proteins. They’re found all over the place, shaping and strengthening plant and animal tissues. There’s the keratin in hair, collagen that holds our organs together, and more.
But for Omenetto, silk comes first. And his team has found an array of new uses for a fiber that humans have been cultivating for millennia. (...)
by Hiawatha Bray, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: Yuji Sakai/Getty, Chemistryworld via
