14 DAY TRIAL // Patients with an insurmountable fear of needles can now rejoice. In the near future, the association between hospitals and needles could be laid to waste, thanks to a new medical device recently created. The instrument is in fact a patch laden with microneedles, which patients cannot feel. They can be used to deliver a wide range of vaccines, and could accelerate the healing process by making it more effective. Its creators envision it as being most effective for diabetes, but other diseases could benefit from modified versions too, LiveScience reports.
“It's our goal to get rid of the need for hypodermic needles in many cases and replace them with a patch that can be painlessly and simply applied by a patient. If you can move to something that's as easy to apply as a Band-Aid, you've now opened the door for people to self-administer their medicine without special training,” Mark Prausnitz explains the purpose of the innovation. He is a scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), and also one of the developers of the new microneedle patch.
The researchers say that it was advancements in the creation of very small structures, such as transistors, that eventually allowed for the technical means of building microneedles to become available at affordable costs. Each of the needles on the new patch is only a few microns long, which is roughly equivalent to the width of very few human hairs. “We've built off [electronics] technological advances to address a need in medicine. We're trying to bring the two worlds together,” Prausnitz says.
“Although it would probably first be used in a clinical setting, our vision is to have a self-administered flu vaccine patch. So instead of making an appointment with your doctor to get your flu shot, you can stop by the pharmacy or even get a patch in the mail and self-apply. We think that could very much increase the vaccine coverage since it would be easier for people to be vaccinated,” the expert adds.
In its experiments on mice, the Georgia Tech team demonstrated that the efficiency of regular needles and that of the new microneedle patch was the same, in terms of the antibodies that were detected after the treatment. One of the advantages that the new device has over conventional needles is that it can be applied to the eyes, which could help treat macular degeneration, a diabetes-related disease that causes many patients to go blind.