Researchers from the McCullagh Group and Mass Spectrometry Research Facility have been working on a new method, published in npj Vaccines, analysing vaccine vial labels and adhesive and therefore allows the vaccine vials to be retained in the supply chain. Furthermore, the study has shown that the technique can also differentiate genuine Covid-19 vaccine liquid from falsified vaccine surrogates, using a recently published method developed using non-Covid vaccines.
Study co-leader, Professor James McCullagh, said: ‘With an increasing global reliance on vaccines to maintain population health, and the rise in substandard and falsified vaccines, this method is both timely and addresses an important global need. I am delighted to see that our recently published method using mass spectrometry with machine learning is already being applied to innovate non-invasive detection of falsified vaccines.’
