How Cambridge start-up Ideabatic is solving the last-mile vaccine delivery challenge in the developing world By Paul Brackley – paul.brackley@iliffemedia.co.uk Published: 06:00, 16 July 2022
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Kitty Liao spent a decade designing and building super cold systems for one of the world’s most complex scientific endeavours – the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. After taking part in a humanitarian hackathon, she turned her attention to something more humble – designing what is essentially a cool bag. But this one isn’t for keeping your picnic fresh.
Only one in four people in Africa has received their first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine – and only one in five on the continent is fully vaccinated against the virus.
Availability of vaccines, and the stranglehold that richer countries have exerted over them, remain key issues.
But there are also major practical challenges to overcome, particularly in more rural or isolated areas.
Chief among these is the lack of cold chain logistics in the final miles of vaccine delivery.
It is a problem that has bedevilled many vaccination programmes in Africa.
The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that in pre-pandemic years between 20 and 50 per cent of all vaccines were spoiled due to mishandling, and in some remote areas in the developing world, the spoilage rate was as high as 85 per cent.
Cambridge humanitarian start-up Ideabatic has found that in some parts of remote Nigeria and Madagascar the spoilage rate can reach 100 per cent, making the whole endeavour a complete waste.
Kitty Liao, the Cambridge scientist who founded Ideabatic, is travelling to Cameroon in August with the company’s innovative portable vaccine carrier, SMILE, which promises to put an end to the problem.
She will work with the Ministry of Health in Cameroon and the UPS Foundation on a six-week pilot study of SMILE with 100 health workers.
It follows a crowd-funding campaign launched by Kitty to raise the money needed to cover her travel costs, which hit its target two days before the June 30 deadline, bolstered by an anonymous donation of £1,000.
Kitty, an alumna of Cambridge Judge Business School, says: “I am so grateful that we have secured the funds to travel for this plan to happen.
“The opportunity was only confirmed two weeks ago, so we didn’t have long to raise over £4,000 to cover my travel costs, and I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to do it.
“I’d like to express a massive thank you to all donors, and other people who have supported my campaign, in particular the Centre for Global Equality.”
The centre is a non-governmental organisation based in King’s Parade, opposite King’s College.
Since 2018, Ideabatic has been a member of its Cultivator, a programme that helps develop innovative ideas that aim to solve global challenges in countries where people live on less than $4 per day.
Intriguingly, the company’s origins go back to 2014, when Kitty was at CERN in Switzerland, designing super cold systems for the Large Hadron Collider.
Recently, her former colleagues at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory were busy generating collisions between protons at unprecedented energy levels, discovering evidence of three new sub-atomic particles as they unravel the mysteries of the quantum world.
Kitty, meanwhile, is preparing for central Africa, where she hopes to solve the challenge of getting life-saving jabs into arms for countries without suitable infrastructure.
“I took part in a humanitarian hackathon at CERN where I realised there is a big problem. According to the WHO, pre-Covid-19, two to three million children died each year of a vaccine-preventable disease and 20 million still lack basic vaccinations,” says Kitty.
“A major reason for this is that during the last few miles of delivery – the so-called last mile – vaccines become damaged by fluctuations in temperature.”
Reaching more remote communities in the developing world is a difficult challenge.
“Health workers carry cool boxes with ice packs in extreme weather and over difficult terrain,” explains Kitty.
“Bear in mind the vaccines must be kept between two and eight degrees Celsius before injection and these journeys can take six days.
“However, current solutions either freeze vaccines or last barely a day when in use.
“One of the issues we observed is human error. For example, using an incorrect amount of ice, repeatedly opening the lid and leaving the lid open all accelerate spoilage.”
For all the millions of pounds poured into developing life-saving Covid vaccines, this is a neglected area, despite many stories of huge numbers of jabs being thrown away.
Kitty was determined to solve the challenge. In principle, it might sound relatively simple: design a vaccine-carrying case that is easy to acquire, reusable and fail-safe.
Despite her decade of work in cryogenic systems – with operating temperatures of -270C – it proved anything but, and it took determination, and collaboration with a team of physicists, designers, engineers, economists and medics, for Kitty to develop SMILE – a patented SMart last-mILE Cooling System.
A freeze-free and fail-safe carrier, it is designed to enable the efficient transport and administering of vaccines. Its hexagonal case features a self-closing, air-locking carousel that is spun so you locate the chamber with the vaccine you wish to administer. It prevents vaccines from rolling around and suffering damage and it uses regular off-the-shelf ice packs that are placed in a way that prevents the vaccines from being frozen.
SMILE backpacks are also equipped with performance-monitoring electronics that enable health workers to keep track of the temperature during the transportation process.
“The self-closing door and the patented air locking dispensing mechanism mean you can take out the vaccines repeatedly without compromising the coolness,” explains Kitty.
“The single ice pack reduces error and keeps vaccines cool for three to six days, without power. SMILE has been iterated, lab tested and field proven.”
Her current trip will generate data demonstrating the benefit of SMILE to communities in need. It could help unlock further design iterations, if any are required, and determine the next steps for the company before – hopefully – large-scale manufacturing makes SMILE a game-changer.
For all the challenges involved in creating it, Ideabatic’s ground-up design has simplicity at its core, meaning it is easily fixable and most of the cooler’s components are easily available worldwide.
Since May 2016, Ideabatic has earned multiple awards and grants, including from the Royal Academy of Engineering and InnovateUK.
The company is now home to individuals from diverse backgrounds, ranging from low temperature physics, design, electronic engineering, mechanical engineering, finance and medicine.
“SMILE will help in last-mile applications for temperature sensitive products, but that’s not all,” noted Kitty. “SMILE will improve efficiency in critical research work and in end-to-end cold chain applications worldwide.”
Kitty impressed Microsoft founder turned billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates with her invention at Expo Live in Dubai in December 2021.
He pointed out that SMILE was likely to be more expensive to create than regular backpacks.
Kitty replied that while that was true, if you took into account the shocking waste inherent in spoiled vaccines, it had the potential to save millions.
“The creation of life-saving vaccines is well-funded, but too little has gone into the most critical last mile. It is now time to make that change,” she said.
