Polymer Patches May Enable Effective DNA Vaccines 83
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.
Re:Anti-vax wingnuts will just pull them off... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)