October 7, 2000
BIRMINGHAM, AL — De-chu Christopher Tang, Ph.D., a UAB researcher who invented a method of vaccination that does not require the use of needles, has received the prestigious Wallace H. Coulter Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The award is presented annually by Georgia Institute of Technology College of Engineering and includes a $100,000 award. Presentation is at an award dinner on October 7 in Atlanta.
Tang, part-time assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is the inventor of a skin-targeted vaccine patch that holds promise of boosting global vaccine coverage by eliminating needle-associated problems. He was a pioneer in the now widely used technology of DNA vaccination.
“Vaccination by a patch in a noninvasive manner is liable to be more efficacious than by conventional needle injections,” Tang said. “This is because the outer layer of skin is in frequent contact with environmental pathogens and the immune system must constantly keep a mobilized biological army along the border to ward off infections. Medical personnel have been injecting vaccines beyond the skin border for more than a century without considering the visible surface of the skin as an effective target site.”
Needleless vaccinations have the advantage of not requiring refrigeration, as well as ease of application by personnel with a lower level of skill. Tang said, “We hope that our demonstration of a vaccine patch will lead to a major shift in the way global vaccination programs are carried out.”
At UAB, the scientist-entrepreneur is a faculty member of the department of dermatology, the Gene Therapy Center and the Comprehensive Cancer Center. His scientific research led to the formation of the company Vaxin, Inc., in 1997, with the microbiologist as its scientific founder. He is now vice president and chief technical officer of the company, which has received the allowance of a patent for the technology it is using to produce a powerful but small and inexpensive vaccine patch.
Tang earned his doctorate in microbiology from Indiana University in 1989, and pursued training at Baylor College of Medicine, Duke University and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He joined the UAB faculty in 1994.
The Wallace H. Coulter Award recognizes individuals with the potential to achieve the highest level of engineering innovation, resulting in technological advances with practical application to the quality of human life and health. The recipients demonstrate the vision, commitment and passion necessary to take an invention from conception to application for the benefit of mankind, despite enormous odds.