Cryogenic Vaccine Transporter (CryoVaT)

We are developing a simple cryogenic storage and transport unit to distribute COVID-19 and additional yet-to-be-developed cryogenic vaccines. We are designing our solution to be low-cost, long-duration (3+ weeks), stand-alone, and unpowered. Our solution will aid in vaccine distribution to remote areas and other locations without cooling infrastructure in poor and middle-income countries.  We hope that it will allow additional populations to access vaccines, and that longer cold storage times will decrease vaccine waste due to spoilage.

When scaled globally, our solution will help enable everyone to access high-efficacy mRNA vaccines.   Assuming an adequate supply of vaccines, distribution access will allow individuals to have better health outcomes, for society to collectively have more robust economic recovery following lockdowns, and for public health systems to reduce the time it takes to vaccinate their people, thereby lowering the number of new variants that develop while people are waiting to be vaccinated.  

Our solution allows for high-efficacy COVID-19 vaccines that require cryogenic storage and transport to reach rural and otherwise hard-to-reach areas. According to the UN, in 2017, 4.13 billion people lived in urban areas and 3.4 billion lived in rural areas.  Therefore our solution could impact almost half of the world’s population directly. In addition, non-rural populations would also benefit from exponentially reduced disease transmission and possibilities for new variants.

In India, 65% of people live in rural areas. If mRNA-based vaccines could be distributed easily to people outside of major cities, India’s devastating COVID-19 death toll would be markedly lower. The rural distribution challenge is not unique to India; 75% of the Ugandan population is rural, less than 1% is vaccinated for COVID-19, and as we write, the country is entering another lockdown to prevent further COVID-19 transmission.

Our proposed solution is an economical medical-supply delivery vessel that maintains internal temperature at -70C for 3+ weeks without external power. It is a cryostat that has a sealed cold-stage to be used for preserving (mRNA or other) vaccines for prolonged periods. 

We utilize material-science of low thermal conductivity and high specific heat of composite materials (G10) and plastics (HDPE) that can be machined easily to realize a thermal capacitor and a thermal choke. The former maintains low temperatures and the latter drastically reduces warm-up.  Ultimately, the core portion sits in a vacuum vessel to maximally throttle warm-up. The vacuum seal also protects against contamination/corruption. The first version we are developing requires a precooled plastic block (see core-technology section for details), and our system maintains the cryogenic temperatures without external power. Future versions will employ “thermal batteries,” i.e. a kg of dry-ice to extend the cold time by 50%. Our goal is that shipping agents would receive a sealed and evacuated package loaded with vaccines, and deliver it to any remote site within 3 weeks meanwhile vaccines would remain cold and potent. Our technology has no major size restriction and will hold up to a hundred vials.

We designed this technology for use in poor countries with large rural populations. We think that rural health care centers or and other vaccine distribution centers that don’t have access to ultra cold storage would most benefit from our technical solution.  Rural areas are often harder to reach by road, and might not be reachable at all by large transport vehicles.  Our durable container could be transported by motorbike, autorickshaw, or bicycle or other means by which people travel.

Since our solution does not require any power, we think it will make vaccines accessible to people regardless of the power infrastructure where they live. Medecins Sans Frontieres estimates that “10% of healthcare facilities in the world’s poorest countries have a reliable electricity supply,” and points to Uganda as an example, where “over 70% of healthcare facilities have inadequate access to power.” We therefore envision that our solution would enable people in poor countries and/or rural communities to have access to vaccines.

Although the target users of our product are rural and/or poor, the beneficiaries will be everyone.  The whole world benefits from increased vaccination since the faster and more completely vaccinations can occur, the less new mutations can develop and propagate. Because our solution does not require additional power once vaccines are packaged, it will also have less of a climate impact during transport than traditional refrigeration techniques.

Vaccine distribution is a core component of pandemic response. The more complete the vaccination of a population, the better a disease can be controlled, mitigating caseloads, deaths, and economic devastation.  Almost half the world’s people live in rural areas (3.4 out of 7.5 billion in 2017), many of them in poor or middle-income countries.  These people would benefit from the fact that our solution is low cost and does not require the complicated cooling infrastructure that many poor countries lack.

We began last year by creating a thermal model with input from JPL engineers.  Presently we are iteratively building and testing a proof-of-concept prototype. We have run 8 bench tests and are getting closer to seeing the results that we expected from our initial calculations.  Since our initial tests, we decreased the warming rate by a factor of 2.  Our calculations indicate that clever engineering coupled with complete initial cooling and proper vacuum (5 mBar) will allow us to maintain a cold volume for around two weeks without cryogens and an additional two weeks with dry ice. Our testing strategy follows the cadence of cryostat building which is well established, therefore we expect to reach these benchmarks with a few more tests.  Commercial solution design-work is next.  Then we will redesign our system for manufacture at scale, and with specific input from vaccine manufacturers, distributors and frontline workers.

We designed our core technology by adapting established technologies from Cosmic Microwave Background telescopes. 

Our innovation is extracting the key thermo-mechanical elements of these telescopes to devise the ideal vaccine transportation unit that can maintain cryogenic temperatures over 3+weeks.  Lengthening the time scale of cold transport and storage would enable vaccines (such as Pfizer for COVID-19) to be distributed in a deep global network without paying severe time-penalties for inefficiencies in logistics.

The core elements of our design have been field tested on telescopes where they were economical for budget-conscious scientific collaborations. Our significant technological improvement is the development of a new unit that will be low-cost, stand-alone and unpowered that can maintain cryogenic temperatures for over 3 weeks. 

The technology we are proposing can be further adapted to assist medical supply chains for all items that require cryogenic storage and transportation. Therefore we expect a catalytic outcome with broader impact. We hope to see this technology alleviate the toll of COVID-19 and also provide other positive impacts in other medical applications.

We are working on a proof-of-concept prototype. Within the next year, we intend to have a robust fieldable prototype that we will test with local communities in California. In this endeavor we will partner with vaccine distribution centers where Loya is already a frontline worker.  After five years, we hope that this will be a commercial solution that will be used in the global cold chain for vaccine transport and storage.

At the moment, our goals are lab-focused: we want our proof-of-concept prototype to consistently achieve the cooling times that our calculations show are possible.  We are working iteratively towards this goal and when we achieve it, we intend to publish results and work with the Caltech Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate Partnerships to patent our results.  After we have working technology and a patent, then we can better plan a strategy for impacting lots of people globally.

Three of us are currently working part time on nights and weekends. With additional support we would increase our group size so as to reach a commercial solution from this prototype stage. 

Dr. Ritoban Basu Thakur is a physicist at Caltech with expertise in cryogenic technology for space sciences and quantum sensors, having worked at University of Illinois, U. Chicago, Stanford, Berkeley, NASA-JPL and Fermilab. Basu Thakur was inspired to create this solution by his father’s experiences as a critical-care specialist in Kolkata, India. In the COVID-19 surge in India, his family members were hospitalized and some unfortunately died.  Witnessing the consequences of insufficient vaccination increased Basu Thakur's resolve to make a solution that helps everyone get vaccinated.

As a former U.S. diplomat, Leah Pillsbury is experienced with creating and implementing programs at the State Department and international NGOs.  She has worked extensively in the developing world (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Bolivia, Ecuador, and India) on environmental, economic and educational initiatives. Inspired to create solutions that work for people and the environment, Pillsbury decided to retrain as an engineer. She holds a MS in Mechanical Engineering. She is committed to seeing this project succeed because of its transformative potential globally.

Alvaro Loya is a first year PhD student in Physics at UCLA and holds a Masters in Physics from NIKHEF.  Loya has experience designing, building and testing experimental physics equipment. He worked at Berkeley, Caltech, Harvard, CERN and NIKHEF on cryogenics and hardware design.  Additionally, he manages COVID-19 testing and vaccination sites in California, Nevada and Oregon. As a frontline worker and scientist, he knows that our solution will play an essential role in the COVID-19 response and that of future pandemics.

Our team has a combined 15 years of expertise on cryogenic technology and thermal physics.  Our personal experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic have contributed to our motivation for creating a solution for transformative impact.

The three of us come from different countries (India, Mexico, United States), and have a variety of work and educational experiences between us.  We find that the differences in our backgrounds helps us solve problems better together.  

Basu Thakur hails from Kolkata, India, where the juxtaposition of the drive for knowledge and the pangs of poverty is stark. This continues to fuel his motivation for applying fundamental sciences to increase equity in global welfare. 

Pillsbury has faced the tribulations of gender bias in the workforce, and therefore she is eager to encourage inclusivity on teams, and regularly teaches STEM topics to middle school girls. 

Loya is a first generation Mexican immigrant to the United States, and his experience in social and academic integration plays front and center in his approach to diversity of our desired workforce and thought processes.

We are committed to developing this solution to reach the market because we want diverse populations to have access to vaccines.

We believe that our solution is an important part of making vaccines more widely available and equitably distributed. We want to see it transition from a proof of concept prototype to a rigorously tested and validated one, and then to a solution that people can actually use. We don’t know how to do this by ourselves and additional resources, networks, and access to funding opportunities that we would get from participating in the program would be invaluable to scaling our solution globally.

Right now we are mainly focused on getting our technology to work in the lab. Our team is sufficiently capable with science and technology. In the next stages, we’ll likely need help on everything else. Given the need to scale up quickly and the complexity with global medical device regulations, financial and human capital, support on business model and legal/regulatory matters will be our next hurdles.

At the moment, we see our competitors as our most likely collaborators. Both Stirling Ultracold and Pfizer have more experience in vaccine storage than we do, and they have a global reach. We’d certainly like to discuss a potential way to work together with them, and there are probably many other partners who would be valuable. 

Our solution is designed for rural populations from poor and middle income countries.  That said, there are also many parts of the United States that are hard to get to and would also benefit from our solution. Additionally, our solution would improve health outcomes globally since we all benefit when more people are vaccinated.

The purpose of our solution is to allow health centers that otherwise would not have access to cryogenic vaccines to receive them. This prize is perfectly aligned with our project. The ability to deliver high-efficacy vaccines in an economic manner would greatly assist health workers and service users and ensure life-saving vaccines are available to them without technological or financial overheads.

The sensors on the transport unit are simple and can be easily monitored by local distributors and healthcare workers to ensure that vacuum and cryogenic temperatures are maintained throughout vaccine transport and storage.

This prize would be very helpful in scaling up our solution. We’d use the prize money on research and development and engineering design. More importantly, we would be interested in piloting a more robust prototype with host country governments and stakeholders in order to make this a globally scalable solution.