Buccal Drug Delivery System Design for Alternative Pain-free Vaccines

Dr. D’Souza completed his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and is currently a Professor and Director of Graduate Programs. He is also the Endowed Chair of Pharmaceutics, and Director of Mercer Clinical laboratory and Co-Director, Center for Drug Delivery, Mercer University, Atlanta, GA
Dr. D’Souza’s Nanotechnology laboratory mainly focuses on the design and delivery of both Buccal vaccines using oral dissolving film (ODF) and Transdermal vaccines using microneedles for infectious diseases and cancer. Currently Dr. D’Souza’s lab is focusing vaccines for Infectious diseases such as SARS CoV-2, Universal Influenza, RSV, Zika, and Gonorrhea – to name a few. Additionally, work is underway on therapeutic vaccines for cancers such as Melanoma, Ovarian, Prostate ad Breast.
Dr. D’Souza has graduated over 60 Ph.D. students and has published over 120 manuscripts. He has been the recipient of several research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Diabetes Association, the Georgia Cancer Coalition, the Georgia Research, Alliance. He serves as an Executive Editor, and is on the Editorial Boards of over 10 Scientific Journals. He has several patents issued in the area of Nanotechnology. Currently, he has several active NIH funded research grants
The D’Souza Lab is currently working on the design and delivery of vaccines using oral dissolving film (ODF) formulations. These ODF formulations are much like “Listerine strips” applied to the buccal cavity. The vaccine antigens are encapsulated into nanoparticles which are then embedded into the oral dissolving films with the aid of an automated 3D Bioprinting technology. This entire process is automated with minimal batch to batch variations. A patent has recently been issued on this Oral Dissolving Film technology containing nano-vaccines.
The oral dissolving film rapidly dissolves when applied to the buccal mucosa, releasing the nano-vaccines, which are rapidly taken up by antigen presenting cells, such as dendritic cells, and “M-cell-like” cells abundantly present in the buccal cavity and delivered to immune system via draining lymph nodes. A strong “mucosal immune response” is generated rapidly at the site of viral infection at all mucosal sites, including the nasopharyngeal and buccal mucosa, thereby helping to control infection rather quickly. This is very desirable, especially for vaccines where the site of entry of viruses are the nose or buccal cavity sch as COVID-19, Flu, RSV
Some current active projects include work on the COVID-19 research, essentially designing a novel Cross-Protective Bivalent COVID-19 vaccine, involving the use of Spike S-1 surface glycoprotein and the more conserved N-RBD Nucleoprotein.
Other vaccine prototypes under development and evaluation include vaccines for Gonorrhea, RSV, Universal Flu, and Zika