Over the course of the past year, awareness of vaccine development and testing practices has skyrocketed amongst the general public. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine, its developmental period had to be rushed due to the unprecedented volume of people developing the disease. Even then, it is still not fully approved and only available through emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration.

Vaccine development is a long and complex process, often lasting upwards of 10 years to ensure mass production and safe use before being made available. Even though most vaccines will not be expedited like the one for COVID-19, we now understand better than ever that the world needs to invest in vaccine development to stay healthy.

Moving forward, vaccine development can be streamlined by utilizing the industry’s best equipment for more consistent research. 2mag stirring systems are your best choice for optimizing your vaccine development and testing – just read on to learn how our products enable your vaccine research.

The Early Phases of Vaccine Development

Though complicated and time-consuming, the path to disease prevention adheres to six stages defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The first two phases – exploratory and pre-clinical – are where a majority of the lab work lies.

• The exploratory phase is a research-intensive stage that involves the identification of natural or synthetic antigens that have the potential to prevent a disease. These antigens may be weakened viruses or bacteria, weakened bacterial toxins, or other substances that originate from pathogens. Normally, the exploratory phase lasts two to four years.
• The pre-clinical phase is when researchers begin testing with tissue-culture or cell-culture systems to determine if the candidate vaccine will produce immunity. Many prospective vaccines don’t make it beyond this stage of development due to a failure to produce the desired immunity or they prove harmful to test subjects. 2mag cell and tissue culture stirrers prove especially useful during this phase.

Cell Cultures in Vaccine Production

Cultured cells are ideal hosts for the reproduction of many viruses. The ability of cell culture systems to produce large quantities of viral particles that have been reduced in effectiveness has served as the basis for production of vaccines for years. Vaccine development requires careful and protective mixing of cell suspensions and culture broths, and your laboratory needs the uncompromising continuous operations offered by 2mag magnetic stirrers.

Unlike bacteria – which can reproduce on their own in suitable growth conditions – a virus requires living cells to infect which it then uses to produce more copies of itself using the cell’s own components. Because of this, many different animal cell strains are used in vaccine research and development. For example, a monkey kidney cell strain is used to grow poliovirus for the inactivated polio vaccine made today.

Effective Research Requires Effective Stirrers

For all your stirring needs, including cell and tissue culture applications, don’t settle for anything less than the best. 2mag offers a full family of stirring systems that are guaranteed to improve the efficiency and quality of work done in your laboratory. Though we may never witness such a hurried vaccine development process again like we saw for COVID-19, the importance of vaccine research is more obvious than ever. Contact 2mag today to learn more about the many applications and features of our stirring systems and see how your procedures can benefit from our stirrers.