Australia: the vaccine through patch, farewell needles and syringes
Posted on April 22, 2010 by christopher
No more needles and syringes for immunization. From Australia is indeed coming, a patch with nanoparticles carrying out the vaccinations more efficiently, avoiding the dreaded use of syringes and needles for injections, nightmare especially children.
I have developed a team of Australian scientists of the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology University of Queensland, led by Mark Kendle. The patch is easy to use and only takes two minutes for the application. “With one-hundredth of the dose of conventional vaccine injection, we obtained a yield equivalent to the best,” said Dr. Kendle, which states that this product will be a great success. “We believe it has the potential to replace or at least minimize the use of needles and syringes. He adds: “The benefits are both physical and mental. First there is the phobia of needles, which suffers 10% of the population. And then the injury or contamination from needles. Just think that in Africa are performed around a billion vaccinations each year, the World Health Organization estimates that approximately 30% of them are unsafe because of cross-contamination. ”
Already in recent months a team of U.S. researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta had developed a “patch of microneedles”, to alleviate the hardships caused by therapies for diabetes, making them more effective and less painful, but also by treatments disorders of the eyes. This patch slowly and painlessly inject drugs (or vaccines) through the skin with minimal discomfort through a series of tiny needles a few hundred microns in length. The researchers who conducted this study believed that the invention would have also brought the first self-administered influenza vaccine. “Our goal – summarizing the chief researcher, Mark Prausnitz – is in many cases eliminating the need for hypodermic needles, painless and replacing them with application used easily by the patient. Although the patch is probably beginning to be used only in medical facilities, our dream is to provide patches for self-administered vaccines, which also greatly increase immunization coverage, making the operation much easier, painless and economic. “