The future of flu vaccines just might come in a tiny, prickly patch.
A phase 1 clinical trial, the results of which were published in the medical journal Lancet on Tuesday, has deemed the dissolvable microneedle flu patch to be "well tolerated" and safe for possible use.
Instead
of receiving a flu vaccine with the typical prick of a syringe, the
petite patch comes equipped with 100 microneedles that deliver a vaccine
when pressed onto your arm.
"They're really small; you can barely
see them," said Dr. Nadine Rouphael, an associate professor at the Emory
University School of Medicine and lead author of the trial, which was a
collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology.
She
described the microneedles as minuscule enough to not cause as much
pain as a traditional flu shot; however, collectively, they were
associated with itchiness at the injection site in the trial.
"We
also looked at the efficacy of the vaccine. Is it able to induce a
similar immune response to the regular flu shot? And it did, actually,"
Rouphael said.
The patch contains
the same type of vaccine that would be found in a traditional needle and
syringe, but it is placed within tiny needles in the patch instead of
being placed in only one large one for a flu shot, she said.
"They are placed on a Band-Aid-like
structure, and then that Band-Aid is applied, in this case, to the
wrist," she said. "There is an audible snap that you hear when you apply
enough pressure to ensure that the microneedles will actually penetrate
the skin.
After few minutes, we remove the patch. By then, those
microneedles will be completely dissolved within the skin, along with
the vaccine."
'They were impressed by how tiny it was'
For
the clinical trial, 100 adult volunteers were vaccinated between June
and September 2015 at the Hope Clinic of the Emory Vaccine Center in
Atlanta. They were randomly separated into four groups before being
treated.
One group received a flu
vaccine via the patch, administered by a health care worker; another
received a flu vaccine via a traditional flu shot; another group
received a placebo microneedle patch, administered by a health care
worker; the fourth group used the patch to self-administer a flu
vaccine. CONTINUE READING
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