Polymer microarrays rapidly identify competitive adsorbents of virus-like particles.

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 highlights the global need for platform technologies to enable the rapid development of diagnostics, vaccines, treatments, and personal protective equipment (PPE). However, many current technologies require the detailed mechanistic knowledge of specific material-virion interactions before they can be employed, for example, to aid in the purification of vaccine components or in the design of a more effective PPE. Here, we show that an adaption of a polymer microarray method for screening bacterial-surface interactions allows for the screening of polymers for desirable material-virion interactions. Nonpathogenic virus-like particles including fluorophores are exposed to the arrays in an aqueous buffer as a simple model of virions carried to the surface in saliva/sputum. Competitive binding of Lassa and Rubella virus-like particles is measured to probe the relative binding properties of a selection of copolymers. This provides the first step in the development of a method for the discovery of novel materials with promise for viral binding, with the next being development of this method to assess absolute viral adsorption and assessment of the attenuation of the activity of live virus, which we propose would be part of a material scale up step carried out in high containment facilities, alongside the use of more complex media to represent biological fluids.

An improved synthesis of poly(amidoamine)s for complexation with self-amplifying RNA and effective transfection

Cationic polymers are widely used as materials to condense nucleic acids for gene-based therapies. These have been developed to mainly deliver DNA and RNA for cancer therapies but the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated an urgent need for new DNA and RNA vaccines. Given this, suitable manufacturing conditions for such cationic polymers which can protect the nucleic acid in the formulation and delivery stages but release the cargo in the correct cellular compartment effectively and safely are required. A number of polymers based on poly(amidoamine)s fit these criteria but their syntheses can be time-consuming, inefficient and poorly reproducible, precluding their adoption as manufacturable vaccine excipients. Here we report an improved synthesis of poly(cystamine bisacrylamide-co-4-amino-1-butanol), abbreviated as pABOL,viamodifications in concentration, reaction time and reaction conditions. Optimisation of monomer contents and stoichiometries, solvents, diluents and temperature, combined with the application of microwaves, enabled the preparation of vaccine candidate pABOL materials in 4 h compared to 48 h reported for previous syntheses. These procedures were highly reproducible in multiple repeat syntheses. Transfection experiments with a model RNA showed that polymers of formulation with appropriate molar masses and mass distributions were as effective in model cell lines as polymers derived from the unoptimised syntheses which have been shown to have high efficacy as RNA vaccine formulation candidates.