Asel Sartbaeva on protecting vaccines with a pinch of sand

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department, ever, so carve up turkey and spiral-cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 brand. And guess what? All their delectable pies are made with no high-fructose corn syrup. Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want Only at Whole Foods Market Sometimes we all need an extra helping hand Especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off Claude is the AI for just that It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow And thinks with you, not for you And Claude isn't just for quick questions Handed a whole task like turning a folder of scattered notes into a report and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit.

1:00Claude can now draft a dock or deck right in front of you, and Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system, and it comes back in your own design language, ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and Slack, and whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai.solve. That's claude.ai.solve.

1:37And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai.solve. You're about to listen to the latest series of The Life Scientific. Episodes will be released weekly wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes 28 days before anywhere else, first on BBC Sounds. Hello. Vaccines save millions of lives each year. But for them to work, most need to be kept cold throughout their journey, from the factory where they're made to the clinic where they're given. This relies on what's known as the cold chain, a global network of fridges, freezers and ice packs.

2:23And it's not only expensive to maintain, it's incredibly fragile. Transport delays, power cuts and equipment failures often break the chain, causing vaccines to spoil before they reach the people who need them. So a burning question in public health has been, could we stabilise vaccines at room temperature so that they don't need this cold chain? It's a question that occurred to my guest today, Asil Satbaiva, during a routine visit to the doctors with her newborn daughter. Originally from Kyrgyzstan and now Associate Professor of Chemistry at Bath University, Asil investigates silica-based materials.

3:02Not a typical background for someone working on vaccines, but it gave her a fresh perspective. Could she coat the vaccine in a protective material that would allow it to survive at room temperature, eliminating the need for refrigeration. Her solution? A perfectly tailored protective coat made from an everyday material, silica, the same substance you find in beach sand. Asil Satbaiva, welcome to The Life Scientific. Thank you for inviting me. Now, of course, you're living here in the UK now, but when you go back to Kyrgyzstan, I gather you're something of a celebrity, where you're a UNICEF goodwill ambassador for their Girls in STEM programme.

3:41Kyrgyzstan is more patriarchal and girls are usually not encouraged to study. Right. So in my case, for example, I was not really encouraged to go to the university. My parents did encourage me. But when I went to study science, actually, I was mocked. So that's what I wanted to change. And we've seen very good results. Well, it seems to have been quite successful because I gather you've been described as a symbol of resistance to sexism in Kyrgyzstan. You actually even stopped in the streets. Is that right? That's correct, yes. A lot of people know about me. It happened because, ironically, in 2017, some prominent, very wealthy men went on Prime TV and started saying something about how women should sit at home and look after children and stuff like that.

4:25And as the whole society was gearing up to go after him, I just happened to win a big award here in the UK. And the whole of the feminist society in Kyrgyzstan all sort of went like, oh, look at this woman, S.A. Sardbaiva. And suddenly overnight it went viral. I always wondered when I was growing up, can one person make a lot of changes? and actually seeing that there is some change happening through my work is really encouraging to me. I myself have two daughters also, so I want to leave this world a better place for my daughters. I do want to see better life in the future than what I had, for example.

5:07Well, as still said, let's find out how this famous Kyrgyzstani woman started out. You were born in 1977. Kyrgyzstan, we should say, is a small country in Central Asia, which was then part of the Soviet Union, of course. What is it like as a country? It's a very small country. It always was considered a bit of a backwater, to be honest. It's an absolutely beautiful country, covered by mountains, beautiful glaciers, beautiful lakes and rivers, gorgeous, gorgeous nature. Presumably it was a rather nomadic country until it becomes industrialised. So Kyrgyz were nomadic people. Right. When Soviet Union came to Kyrgyzstan, so this is 1920s, there was this big push for settling people.

5:51Obviously, propaganda is a lot easier on settled people than on people who just pack up and go away somewhere else. Then a lot of industries were brought in too. There was this settlement happening. I was born in the capital, which used to be called Frunza and now it's called Bishkek. What was life like for you as a young child? What do you remember? I had a very happy childhood. I was in one of those very middle class families. My mother worked at the State History Museum and my father worked at the Art Union. In Kyrgyzstan, it's a very tribal society, very, very big, multi-generational families.

6:32All of my formal education was in Russian. Right, yes. But Kyrgyz was used at home. Being under Soviet rule, of course, as you say, you had to learn Russian as the official language. Were there day-to-day restrictions on your lives in terms of freedoms? There was a lot of scarcity of products. So, for example, when I was going to school when I was six, they were not always possible to buy shoes or clothes because they were just not there. I remember every day we had to stand in some kind of queue for bread or for milk. And this was in the late 80s, just before the breakup of the Soviet Union. Were you aware big change was coming?

7:12There were definitely signs. And now thinking back from all of that scarcity, there became a complete deficit of everything. Lots of people lost their jobs. And then I still remember my father trying to tune the radio to find the shortwave signals from Prague, from the Liberty Radio, to just hear some news of what's happening, you know, because on state TV, there was zero information. You were in your early teens back then. And do you remember how you felt about it? I didn't know what was happening, but I knew something was happening. And it was scary. It was exciting at the same time. My parents, I think, were scared, actually, at the time, because it was unknown what will be next.

7:55That collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 plunged this newly independent Kyrgyzstan into a period of severe price rises, sudden unemployment and things like energy shortages. You were 14 at the time. What impact did this have on you and your family? My parents lost their jobs. So suddenly we didn't have a lot of money. The big problem was even if you did have money, there wasn't really much to buy anyway. So we went through several really hard years when we hardly had food sometimes. I remember I had to actually go to the field near us because we lived on the edge of the city. People would grow onions, potatoes there, for example.

8:42And then during the harvest period, a lot of us children, we would go to help with collecting. And to pay us for the labour, we would get a bag of potatoes and that would be for the whole winter for us. Wow. How did you feel about this at the time? Obviously, reflecting back, I know how hard it was for all of my family. What I noticed in my everyday life was that, for example, the buses were not running. I didn't have sometimes money for the bus, so I had to walk. So things like that. And that made my life actually, of course, harder. It was also around this time, I believe, that you really started to value your studies.

9:20What prompted that? Imagine the country. There's absolutely no stability around. And I think what I really wanted was this stability. And I found it in my studies of very technical subjects because I saw how history could be completely misrepresented. And I wanted something which you cannot misrepresent, like numbers, concrete numbers. You can't misrepresent that or concrete facts and stuff like that. So I think that's really what gave me that sense of stability. So as you say, science in particular made you realise you could find some objective truth there, somehow away from the uncertainty, from the propaganda that you'd grown up with.

10:02Yes, I think that's what it represented to me. Ironically, of course, when I went to the university, I learned how little I knew. The more we learn, the more we know how little. But back at that moment, just finding facts helped me to cope with everything what was happening around. Well, after leaving school, you began a combined undergraduate and master's degree in natural sciences. This was at the Kyrgyz Russian Slavic University in Bishkek. Set up as part of a new wave of university education in this post-Soviet era, what was university life like? It was an exciting time for me as a new student, but it was very male-dominated.

10:43The majority of the students were Russian. And then we had specialisation after second year. And my specialisation specifically was in strength of materials, as it was called. And you were entering these Olympiad competitions. Tell me about that. So Olympiad is really big in Kyrgyzstan. It was big in Soviet Union too. So I ended to do strength of materials. I got first place at the university. And then I was then sent to the national one. and when I arrived I was turned away because I was told no girls usually come to Strength of Materials it's a boys subject and when I said no no no I am at the right place and when I won the first place some people told me oh this must have been a mistake so I was quite annoyed with that so I went next year and I wanted again just to put a stop to all of this.

11:34There was an international version that you weren't allowed to even enter being a woman? Yes, I only found out about it years afterwards. And despite the fact that I won the first place, I was not even told the guy who won the second place, who is Russian, was sent to this international Olympiad. So how did you feel when you found out? I was upset. But many years have passed now. After finishing your degree, you began a PhD at the same university in Bishkek, but you didn't really plan to see it through there. I did not, because when I was a student, there were three students getting their PhDs, and this big short professor from Moscow came to be the external examiner, and all of us were allowed to come in.

12:21And this Russian professor was just shouting at all of the students, just belittling them so much. By the end of it, I spoke to my supervisor and I said, this is normal. This is how it's done. So that's why I knew from the beginning that I did not want to stay and do PhD. Aligned with that, you'd always been drawn to wanting to come over to the UK. Yes, I always had a special place for UK in my heart. I still remember when I was about five or six, when my parents would read me books about UK. And I had this beautiful picture of UK being a very fair, open society for immigrants. Well, as you said, Maiva, during the early stages of your PhD, the opportunity of possibly coming over to the UK presented itself to you.

13:09Yes. So I was volunteering at the Library of the British Council. And ironically, The Economist was the most popular journal. There was a big queue for it always. The New Scientist, nobody was interested. And it felt to me like I was the only person who actually ever opened it. And I saw the advert in it for a PhD in Cambridge. So I sent my CV. And then on the same day when I came home, I got a phone call and someone with this beautiful British accent goes, can I speak to Asil Sardbaeva? So I said, yes, it's me. We start chatting. And he says, I wanted to call you to find out if you're a real person and Kyrgyzstan is a real country.

13:46Sort of outraged me a little bit at the time. And I I remember I sort of went, of course I'm a real person and this is a real country. So we talked about this PhD and then I found out in two weeks time that I got the place. It was a full scholarship. That must have been hugely significant. It was amazingly significant because without it I wouldn't be able to come to the UK. The following year you started your PhD at Cambridge in mineral physics, studying several naturally occurring minerals made up of silica. Now, these minerals exist in various crystalline forms made up of these lattices of silica molecules.

14:24Now, each silica molecule is an atom of silicon with several oxygen atoms attached to it. The most common silica mineral, of course, is quartz. So how are these silica molecules arranged in quartz? So in quartz, they're arranged in this hexagonal shape. And that hexagonal shape is repeated over billions of atoms. So stacks of these hexagons, one above the other. All stuck together, and that creates that beautiful long channel. So we have these channels running through the whole crystal. What was it you were trying to understand? So in quartz above 400 or so centigrade, that channel changes its shape, and that then affects anything what is moving inside.

15:05This could be other atoms, for example, or big molecules or small molecules. So what are the applications? The quartz was used for watches, for example. The purer the crystals, the better the watches worked. So those impurities which can move through the channels are easier to remove at high temperatures because of that specific motion which I was studying. Right. OK. Well, you met your husband, Stephen Wells, while working on these silica-based structures and you've collaborated with him ever since. Yes. So Stephen's PhD was more on computer simulations and modelling. My work was very experimental and very quickly we started writing papers where I would do an experiment.

15:49And Stephen then used molecular simulations to explain the findings or to help me understand some of the results. Host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department ever. So carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 brand. And guess what? All their delectable pies are made with no high fructose corn syrup. Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want. Only at Whole Foods Market. Sometimes we all need an extra help in hand. Especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off.

16:33Claude is an AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hands it a whole task like turning a folder or scattered notes into a report and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a dock or deck right in front of you and Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system and it comes back in your own design language ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and Slack, and whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter.

17:19For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai.solve. That's claude.ai.solve. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. claude.ai slash solve.

17:38Well, after your PhD, you took up a research position at Arizona State University in Phoenix, where you developed a passion for another silica mineral, zeolite. Zeolites are wonderful minerals. The word zeolite means boiling stone from Greek, But they are beautiful mineral structures, so we can have those channels of quite large sizes. In zeolites, we can have not just six rings, like in quartz, but we can have, for example, eight, 12 rings, and hence we can have larger channels running through the whole crystal. Now we know that up to about 50 % of those channels could be occupied by water, by other molecules going in and out.

18:21So they're being used in a lot of different everyday life around us. So in washing powders, because they remove calcium from the water and soften the water and the washing process is easier. My favourite example of the use of zeolite is cat litter that can absorb and hold on to a lot of liquid, which is very useful. And a lot of odors also. And I wanted to understand how to experimentally make more different types of zeolites because they are so useful. And I was absolutely fascinated at the time. Well, after coming back from the US, you continued to work on zeolites at Oxford University. And in 2010, you accepted a Royal Society University Research Fellowship there.

19:03These are very prestigious research fellowships that mean you have the freedom to actually go and do whatever you want. But it was during this year that you had an idea that would eventually lead you to think about silica-based structures in an entirely new way. Yes. So imagine I've just received this prestigious fellowship, but also at the same time, I give birth to my daughter. And when she was about two months old, I took her to be vaccinated against TB. And the doctor took out the vaccine from the fridge to inject her. And that's when I thought, hang on, why do vaccines have to be refrigerated?

19:39I even naively asked the doctor, shouldn't we warm it up a bit? And the doctor said, no, no, no, if we warm it up, it's going to spoil. right so that started me thinking why do vaccines have to be refrigerated and as any scientist does the first thing i needed to find out what are they made of and i learned that majority of the traditional vaccines are made out of viruses viral particles yeah and all of those viruses are made of proteins and they have to be stored between two and eight degrees as soon as they go above those temperatures they break down by physical unfolding and it's this physical unfolding which then leads to this vaccine spoiling.

20:18So where did this lead you in terms of what you wanted to look into? I thought if proteins degrade because of this physical unfolding, can I come up with some kind of way of stopping them from physical unfolding? Before we get into what happened next, just a quick recap on vaccines. Now, most can't be stored at room temperature as their active biological component degrades. some vaccines even have to be frozen. What are the implications of this when we're trying to get vaccines to people around the world? The implications are quite horrendous because as soon as that vaccine is made it has to remain in the fridge all the way up until it is being administered.

21:00Imagine if somebody on the way would switch off the fridge or the refrigerated vehicle would break down that means that the whole shipment of all of those vaccines spoil. 1.5 million children under five are still dying from vaccine preventable diseases every year because we can't get those vaccines majority because we physically cannot bring those vaccines so we're wasting today or something on order of about 25 percent of the vaccines so thinking of my childhood i had hepatitis a when i was about 10 so a lot of those diseases are still ranging around in low-income countries unfortunately so let's get back to your idea that had begun to crystallise in your mind over the previous two years?

21:44So when I saw that vaccines are made out of proteins which unfold and break down, I thought, how can I stop them from unfolding? And of course, I've already studied zeolites. I've studied molecules going in. So I started thinking, how can I use my knowledge of silica to grow that coating on top? And I took inspiration here from marine diatoms. These are tiny creatures which live in rivers and oceans all around the world. They secrete this enzyme which creates the silica shell around their body. And because their bodies have different shape, the shell has very bespoke shape too. And that's exactly what I wanted to do with vaccines.

22:25So I wanted to see, can I create that bespoke shell to create that protection for the vaccines? It had to fit the vaccine's molecular shape. Why is that important? You're absolutely right, because I wanted to really create that bespoke shape, Armani-like coat, I call it, so that the molecule doesn't have any opportunity to start unfolding or moving. So this is like a straitjacket to stop it from moving about and unfolding, right? That's correct, exactly. I wanted to stop it from unfolding. I wanted to bring in that thermal stability aspect. What did people make of this idea of yours? I had one professor who said to me, brilliant idea, let's work together or let's do some experimentation together.

23:09And I had another professor who said to me, why are you wasting my time? Go away, do your work on zeolites. So, yeah, it was like Marmite, actually. I believe your husband, Stephen, was very supportive. Yes, Stephen was the sounding board to all of those ideas. And we eventually became the two co-inventors of the insilication method, as we called it later. Well, in 2012, you had the chance to test this idea. You had this Royal Society Research Fellowship, which meant you could take it anywhere. You didn't have to stay at Oxford. You chose to go to the University of Bath. Asil, before we get into what you did, we should say that other researchers have tried to create a vaccine that's stable at room temperature.

23:51How are their approaches different? Absolutely. There are some people who are using sugar glass, which they're applying on top. There are some others who are adding some enzymes or other molecules for stabilisation. There isn't really anyone who has taken through clinical trials into commercial use yet. So you set to work trying to create a silica coat around a protein to make it stable at room temperature. At this stage, you were coating proteins as proof of concept rather than vaccines, because after all, vaccines contain proteins. So in simple terms, what did these experiments involve? We would take a solution of a protein and then we would add silica molecules to it and then start growing that bespoke silica shell all around the protein.

24:40Well, eventually, in 2015, these experiments paid off. The protein that you'd coated with silicate stayed biologically active at room temperature. But you were really punishing this protein to see if the silica casing could still protect it. Why take it to such extremes? We needed to show that the method works very quickly. And hence, we actually boiled a lot of our proteins. But then what we found was that on the unprotected one, it's broken down, so it's not producing any results. But the protected one actually still functioned. This wasn't an easy process, I gather. It took a long time. It took years, in part because I was not a biologist and I had to learn a lot.

25:22And obviously, collaboration really helped. But also, it's not an easy problem to solve. Well, it wasn't until 2017 that you were able to prove the protein was protected by your tailor-made silica coat. But how could you be sure that it was actually still inside this coat, that it was the coat that was the reason why it was still working? It's very hard to show when you have that silica all around the biological inside because biological experiments don't interact well with silica. But those experiments which usually can see silica quite well, they don't interact well with biological assays. So this was always a big struggle for us.

26:03The physics and the biology weren't... They were not cooperating. Not cooperating. Yeah. So what we did is we applied for this special beam time at Diamond Light Source, a big national facility. We did a very interesting experiment to look at the early onset of insilication. So we shone that very powerful X-ray beam on the solution, a protein, and then we added our silica. Amazingly, we were able to see in the first seconds how the silica particles start growing all around and create that Armani-like fitted coat. Now, I should say that this silica you were using is derived from beach sand. Why that particular structure?

26:45Because it doesn't have that arrangement as in crystalline materials. It has that random arrangement. And I needed that random arrangement to make it grow all around the biomolecules. To make the bespoke shape of the coat. OK, so, Asil, you'd proved that you could encase a protein in this bespoke silica coat and protect it from spoiling at room temperature and indeed higher temperatures. Your next step was to see if you could coat a vaccine, the tetanus vaccine. And you came up with quite a novel way of testing whether it also survived at room temperature. We send the unprotected and protected tetanus vaccine samples to our collaborators in Newcastle.

27:28So from Bath to Newcastle, normal post, no refrigeration, nothing. Took three days to arrive. It was then injected into mice in Newcastle to see what the immune response will be. And quite amazingly, we saw that the mice which were injected with the protected tetanus vaccine got the same immune response as your normal refrigerated sample. But the ones who received the unprotected tetanus vaccine did not get any immune response showing that that vaccine has completely spoiled. Well, since then, you've conducted further animal studies to show that the tetanus vaccine stimulates an immune response.

28:06What about the silica coat? What happens to it once the vaccine has been injected? Do we know that it's safe? Yes, we've actually done animal work to see if there is any accumulation of silica anywhere, which we didn't see again. Also, the material which I'm using, it's a very biocompatible material in the body. We do have some silica in our body. If there is excess of it, then the body would excrete it naturally. So it's a material which is really easy to use. Also, it's a very cheap material. Well, the COVID-19 pandemic was a turning point for your work, I understand. Before COVID, lots of people were telling me, start a company, start a company.

28:45I was resisting for a very long time. And then during COVID, everybody were talking about the vaccines. It's hard to transport them. It became really, really abundantly clear to me that I should have started the company. And I believe it became personal. The Kyrgyzstan government in particular had turned down the COVID vaccine, saying they didn't have the refrigeration facilities. There was one specific day where I spent the whole day lobbying the government through Twitter, actually. I was on Twitter at the time. Not anymore. but eventually I actually got all the way up to the vice prime minister and the next day the minister for health came out saying of course they will receive the vaccines well worth spending that time.

29:29So in 2021 you and your husband co-founded Encilitech, University of Bath spin-out company with you as CEO. The idea here was to use your ensilication technology to deliver medicines to benefit people. So far, your work has been in animal studies. So what's next? So, yes, when we started the company, we started looking, obviously, at the commercial side and where this is going to be used. Whilst our mission always was to deliver vaccines for humans. We also started looking at other use cases and we found that a lot of vaccines for animals also have the same issues. And currently we're already working with three big producers of the animal vaccines.

30:24And thinking about the vaccines for humans, what's your hope for these vaccines going forward? So I really hope that we can take them through clinical trials very soon, in about a year or two. That means that we potentially can have some thermally stable vaccines in about five or six years. How much do you think this new technology, vaccines stable at room temperature, could transform world health, particularly for low and middle income countries like Kyrgyzstan? My hope really is to make as many vaccines thermally stable as possible. Because if your vaccines are thermally stable, they don't need refrigeration.

31:02I literally can put them in an envelope, send them anywhere around the world by normal post, or put them on a drone. And that would be the ideal situation, because then everyone can get to the vaccines which they need. We can actually even think about eliminating some of these diseases. But also for the producers of the vaccines, insilication offers a cheaper way to produce vaccines which can be put in an envelope and send all around the world. Wow. As you said, Baiva, thank you very much for sharing your Life Scientific. Thank you very much. And thank you for listening. I'm Jim Al-Khalili and the producer was Beth Eastwood.

31:38If you enjoyed this edition of The Life Scientific, why not check out some of our other interviews with leading scientists? You can access the whole archive for free on BBC Sounds. Sometimes we all need an extra help in hand, especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is an AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Handed a whole task like turning a folder of scattered notes into a report and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit.

32:13Claude can now draft a dock or deck right in front of you and Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system and it comes back in your own design language ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use like Gmail and Slack and whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai.solve. That's claude.ai.solve.

32:51And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai.solve. It was the first dinosaur ever to be scientifically named. And he came up with an animal that was about 40 feet long. A profound discovery that led to paleontology as we know it today. Impossible monsters, these giant, weird reptilian creatures. This was like a thunderbolt. Join me, Misha Glennie, and my three guests for In Our Time on this episode, Megalosaurus. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.