Vaccines can be delivered through the skin using ultrasound. This method doesn’t damage the skin and eliminates the need for painful needles. To create a needle-free vaccine, Darcy Dunn-Lawless at the University of Oxford and his colleagues mixed vaccine molecules with tiny, cup-shaped proteins. They then applied liquid mixture to the skin of mice and exposed it to ultrasound – like that used for sonograms – for about a minute and a half.
We are one step closer to hypo sprays from Star Trek. I don’t like needles so this will be really neat to see in mass adoption.
Hyposprays already were invented, mass produced, used as standard in the military for several years, and abandoned because they weren’t as hygienic as needles.
Anything that pushes through the skin into the blood pushes pathogens in too. Statistically, needles were safer so hyposprays were abandoned.