So long, syringe - how to get a painless vaccination

Patches packed with tiny needles will make it less unpleasant to get vaccinated and may finally convince sceptical parents to protect their children from avoidable diseases.

Dissolving microneedles can make vaccinations cheaper and less painful

In 10 seconds? Avoiding the diseases will get less painful when vaccination patches containing dissolving microneedles enter commercial use. This method lowers costs and can reduce pain and long-lasting itching, which made some parents refuse jabs for their children. (Read the science here)

No pain, just gain then? Microneedles may cause some discomfort, but have a number of benefits over conventional jabs. Believe it or not, doctors and nurses are not fully aware that an injection too high up on the arm can cause lasting pain. There is even a term for this: Shoulder Injury Related to Vaccine Administration (SIRVA). Patches may also remove the side-effects that make some parents concerned. (Read more here)

What side-effects? Itching up to five years in kids, which turns out to be the fault of the adjuvants. To make vaccinations injected into muscles more effective, aluminium salts called adjuvants are added to jabs. According to large-scale studies in Sweden, less than 1% of children receiving first-time vaccinations developed adverse skin reactions because of these aluminium salts, but this was enough for a third of Swedish parents to reject further vaccinations. (More on child aluminium hypersensivity here)

So the patches might make aluminium adjuvants obsolete? Indeed. The benefit comes from the fact that the vaccine is delivered through the skin by the microneedles in the patch. As the skin is rich in cells that can kick-start the production of disease-fighting antibodies, this method can provoke a better immune reaction from the body. Another method could be the use of so called molecular adjuvants that target cells more precisely and thus have less negative side-effects.

And how much will I pay for this high-tech pharma? Well, the beauty of this is that the microneedle patch can be self-administered, meaning we don’t need to pay a doctor of a nurse to do it. Studies show that they can be stored in temperatures up to 40°C as opposed to conventional vaccines that survive in a fridge that means cheaper storage and transport. And the fact the microneedles dissolve on the skin brings another saving: no need to pay for their safe disposal.

How do microneedles work?

Microneedles can mean painless injections. This is because they are so tiny that they only penetrate the stratum corneum of the skin and don’t reach the deeper lying pain receptors.
 
Devices using microneedles are made up of hundreds or thousands of small needles that can be thinner than a human hair.
 
Microneedles are manufactured from sugars and polymers. The dissolving variants are mainly made by micro-molding, photopolymerization and droplet-airborne blowing.

This research was curated by Nicolas Gutierrez, Sparrho Hero and Researcher at University del Valle, Colombia specialising in mitochondrial DNA and mitochondrial diseases

Find more exciting scientific discoveries at our blog, like why CO2 is not the harmful gas it was made out to be

(Psst, Nicolas distilled 11 research papers to save you 231.2 min)