Polymer Patches May Enable Effective DNA Vaccines

Zothecula writes "Taking a two-month-old in for vaccination shots and watching them get stuck with six needles in rapid succession can be painful for child and parent alike. If the work of an MIT team of researchers pans out, those needles may be thing of the past thanks to a new dissolvable polymer film that allows the vaccination needle to be replaced with a patch. This development will not only make vaccinations less harrowing, but also allow for developing and delivering vaccines for diseases too dangerous for conventional techniques." The patch was designed with delivering DNA-based vaccines in mind. Thus far efforts to use DNA to generate more robust and safe vaccines has failed thanks to the immune system destroying them; the polymer film embeds itself in your skin and slowly dissolves, protecting the DNA in the process.

Comments

A Spartan existence

[concealment]

My kids only eat what they can kill. Since we live in the city, it's tough on them (and on the neighborhood pigeons), but they're going to true Nietzschean superpeople when I'm done with them!

Abused how exactly?

[Immerman]

Honestly I don't see a problem

You can be easily infected by deadly viruses via any number of methods, many of which you'd never notice. A scratch with a contaminated thumbtack would be enough for most nasty viruses.

If narcotic delivery were possible and caught on it would be a big win for everyone - the addicts wouldn't be tempted to reuse needles, and the rest of us wouldn't have to worry about used needles being improperly disposed of.

As for a roofie patch, roofies are dangerous because they can be quickly and covertly slipped into a drink, whereas you're much more likely to notice someone putting a patch on you - even if it takes you a few minutes to notice that someone has put a sticker on you it'll still be a lot more obvious and you'll have a window of opportunity to get help before the microneedles dissolve.

Re:Anti-vax wingnuts will just pull them off...

[Jason Levine]

From the article: “You just apply the patch for a few minutes, take it off and it leaves behind these thin polymer films embedded in the skin”

This doesn't sound like a band-aid that you'd rip off as soon as you left the doctor's office. Instead, you'd have the patch applied, wait a few minutes, and then the doctor would take it off and you'd be done. The polymer film would be embedded in your skin and nearly impossible to remove. (At least not without removing a good chunk of the skin with the polymer.)