Vaccine patch offers pain-free way to stop disease in Papua New Guinea

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/dec/26/vaccine-disease-papua-new-guinea


The "nanopatch" is about a square centimetre in size, it administers a minute, needle-free vaccine dose to a person's skin, dramatically reduces costs and needs neither to be administered by trained medical staff nor to be refrigerated.

But Professor Mark Kendall, a former Oxford rocket scientist turned bioengineer at the University of Queensland in Australia, is cautious about the prospects for what many are hoping could revolutionise infectious disease prevention in developing countries, where around 17 million people die from avoidable diseases each year.

"It has many advantages. It is pain-free, very low cost and could be self-administered. It could be posted to people as it needs no skill to administer. Where [some vaccines] cost $50 (£31) each, this could reduce the cost to $1," he says.

The traditional syringe and needle vaccination, which has barely changed since it was invented in 1853, has big disadvantages, he says. It injects the vaccine into the muscle, which has few immune cells; it needs a relatively large shot of vaccine, and it poses problems with needle contamination and disposal.