Aside from sparing patients who are squeamish about being pricked, this new application of nanotechnology could have significant public health benefits.
"Because the nanopatch requires neither a trained practitioner to administer it nor refrigeration, it has enormous potential to cheaply deliver vaccines in developing nations," said lead researcher Mark Kendall, a professor at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
AIBN / The University of Queensland
Professor Mark Kendall's research demonstrates that a vaccine delivered by a nanopatch can improve the vaccination experience for young children -- and stop the tears triggered by needles.
And being both painless and needle-free, the nanopatch has the potential to improve the vaccination experience for young children worldwide, Kendall said in a statement released by the university.
Kendall told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the nanopatch is designed to place vaccines directly into the skin, where a "rich body of immune cells are." A needle, by contrast, injects vaccines into muscles with few immune cells. As a result, the vaccines delivered by nanopatch are more effective, he said.
The nanopatch is "much smaller than a postage stamp and comprised of several thousands of densely packed [nano-sized] projections invisible to the human eye," the professor said. Through those projections, it targets cells found in a narrow layer just beneath the skin surface.
In tests on laboratory mice, Kendall and his team dry-coated influenza vaccine onto the projections, then applied the patches to the animals' skin for two minutes -- all it took for the full dosage to be delivered.
"Our result is 10 times better than the best results achieved by other delivery methods" being developed elsewhere around the globe, he said. "And by using far less vaccine, we believe that the nanopatch will enable the vaccination of many more people."
Kendall added, "When compared to a needle and syringe, a nanopatch is cheap to produce, and it is easy to imagine a situation in which a government might provide vaccinations for a pandemic such as swine flu to be collected from a [pharmacist] or sent in the mail," he added in the announcement.
The researchers' next step is to prove the effectiveness of nanopatches in human clinical trials.
