Up to 80% of the cost of vaccination programmes is due to the cold chain problem (that is, keeping vaccines cold). Inexpensive, biocompatible additives to slow down the degradation of virus particles would address the problem. Here we propose and characterize additives that, already at very low concentrations, improve the storage time of adenovirus type 5. Anionic gold nanoparticles (10^-8-10^-6 M) or polyethylene glycol (PEG, molecular weight ∼8,000 Da, 10^-7-10^-4 M) increase the half-life of a green fluorescent protein expressing adenovirus from ∼48 h to 21 days at 37 °C (from 7 to >30 days at room temperature). They replicate the known stabilizing effect of sucrose, but at several orders of magnitude lower concentrations. PEG and sucrose maintained immunogenicity in vivo for viruses stored for 10 days at 37 °C. To achieve rational design of viral-vaccine stabilizers, our approach is aided by simplified quantitative models based on a single rate-limiting step.

中文翻译：

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用于疫苗存储的添加剂可改善腺病毒从几小时到几个月的热稳定性。

高达80％的疫苗接种费用是由于冷链问题（即使疫苗保持低温）造成的。廉价的生物相容性添加剂可以减缓病毒颗粒的降解，从而解决该问题。在这里，我们提出和特征的添加剂，已经在非常低的浓度下，提高腺病毒5型阴离子金纳米颗粒（10的存储时间^-8 -10 ^-6  M）或聚乙二醇（PEG，分子量~8,000沓，10 ^{- 7} -10 ^-4 M）在37°C下将表达绿色荧光蛋白的腺病毒的半衰期从约48小时增加到21天（在室温下从7天增加到> 30天）。他们复制了已知的蔗糖稳定作用，但浓度降低了几个数量级。PEG和蔗糖对在37°C下保存10天的病毒具有体内免疫原性。为了实现病毒疫苗稳定剂的合理设计，我们的方法是基于单个限速步骤的简化定量模型来辅助的。