Imperial College London chemical engineer develops new technology to tackle global inequalities in vaccination coverage

A new technology that allows vaccines to be stored at room temperature in liquid form could tackle global health inequalities.

The Royal Society of Chemistry has heralded Apanpreet Kaur, a chemical engineer from Imperial College London, after she co-developed nanoparticles that keep vaccines stable in liquid form at room temperature.

Currently, many vaccines need to be refrigerated to remain stable, which makes them extremely challenging to distribute, store and deploy to parts of developing nations, as access is reliant on an expensive network of temperature-controlled transport and storage.

The Royal Society of Chemistry recently celebrated Apanpreet’s company, AlphaVectors Biotech, among the finalists in its Emerging Technologies Competition 2026, which celebrates cutting edge science that tackles global issues.

We were honored to have been named a finalist of the Emerging Technologies Competition. For us, it shows there are others out there who believe in the potential of our technology and share our vision to eliminate the multi-billion-dollar infrastructure challenge that is very sadly preventing vaccines from reaching patients in some parts of the world. We have big ambitions, and we’re very excited to grow our company.”

Dr. Apanpreet Kaur, Co-Founder and CEO, AlphaVectors Biotech

Apanpreet was inspired to tackle the problem after watching governments grapple with this infrastructure challenge when rolling out the COVID-19 vaccines.

She said: “When COVID happened, we realized cold-chain infrastructure was creating a massive bottleneck, which prevented the vaccines from getting to certain corners of the world where they were really needed. We had already started developing these nanoparticles and thought our platform technology has real potential to actually solve this problem.”

Having initially co-developed the technology for her PhD thesis in Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London, she founded AlphaVectors Biotech with partner, a fellow chemical engineer at the university Professor Rongjun Chen last year, with the aim of bringing the technology to market. The technology is undergoing a validation study with a world-leading pharmaceutical company, and the duo hope to start human trials within the next two years.

Ben Voysey, Entrepreneurship Manager at the Royal Society of Chemistry, added: “Our annual Emerging Technologies Competition aims to celebrate budding new technologies that address real-world problems and we’ve been blown away by the caliber of entries this year. We believe in the power of chemistry to transform lives, and Apanpreet’s story truly exemplifies chemistry at its best. We can’t wait to watch AlphaVectors Biotech go from strength to strength.”