A dissolvable flu vaccine patch that could reduce waste and avoid the need for a health care professional, researchers say today.
Dr Nadine Rouphael of Emory University, USA, and her team explain in The Lancet that microneedle patches "provide an alternative to conventional needle-and-syringe immunisation, and potentially offer improved immunogenicity, simplicity, cost-effectiveness, acceptability, and safety".
Non-dissolvable microneedles have been tested many times for delivering the flu vaccine, but dissolvable microneedle patches have only been tested once, in a small unreliable study from 2015.
So Dr Rouphael’s team recruited 100 adult participants for their study. All received a single dose of inactivated influenza vaccine called fluvirin.
The researchers found that "the use of a single dissolvable microneedle patch for influenza vaccination was well tolerated, resulted in robust antibody responses, and was preferred over conventional influenza vaccination with needles and syringes".
They also confirmed that the microneedle patches could be reliably self-administered, were stable for at least a year at 40°C, and generated no sharps waste.
"These advances could reduce the cost of influenza vaccination and increase patient access to influenza vaccine, thereby increasing vaccination coverage and protection from influenza morbidity and mortality," they report.
"Once confirmed by larger trials, the use of microneedle patches for influenza vaccination could have major public health implications on vaccination coverage and protection from disease."
Co-author Professor Mark Prausnitz says: "The microneedle patch was reliably used by study participants because we incorporated an audible and tactile feedback mechanism to tell participants when sufficient force is applied.
"After vaccination, examination of used microneedle patches showed that the microneedles had dissolved in the skin, suggesting that used patches could be discarded as non-sharps waste, potentially further increasing the safety and reducing the cost of vaccine delivery."
Rouphael, N. G. et al. The safety, immunogenicity, and acceptability of inactivated influenza vaccine delivered by microneedle patch (TIV-MNP 2015): a randomised, partly blinded, placebo-controlled, phase 1 trial. The Lancet 28 June 2017; doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30575-5 [abstract]
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