VACCINE TEAM is designing a cheap, reliable way to detect the freezing of vaccines during transport, which renders them ineffective.
As they learned more about why their initial designs, which were largely focused on issues surrounding syringe technology, this team discovered important issues in stabilizing the vaccine cold chain, particularly when vaccines travel to developing regions, where control over the cold chain can be difficult. Existing technologies can show whether a vaccine has been overheated, often rendering it ineffective, though technologies for showing whether vaccines have been frozen are less reliable. This team is creating a simple solution that shows when a vaccine has been frozen, and where exactly in the cold chain freezing occurred.