The effective oral delivery of vaccines represents one of the ¿holy grails¿ of drug delivery for reasons of 1) cost, 2) convenience and 3) patient compliance. However, the application of oral vaccine delivery is not limited to the clinical arena but would also be applicable to the veterinary arena in order to control not only the spread of economically devastating diseases threatening food security but also the zoonotic spread of infection from animal populations to humans. We have developed a novel delivery system comprising silica immobilised proteins coated in fatty acid, that remain stable at room temperature over a period of months, that allows the regeneration of the protein activity once the fatty acid has been removed. In this proposal, we wish to quantify the nanostructure of the silica/protein/enteric coat system.