written by Tara Haelle

Most children find nothing fun about needles, including the shots they get for their immunizations. So wouldn’t it be nice if at least one of those vaccines could be magically delivered through their skin with a sticker? They could get the fun sticker during the immunization instead of afterward!

Well, actually it would be a patch, but, hey, they’re kinda the same. A research team has developed a new way to deliver the measles vaccine without the Ouch. Their new measles vaccine patches actually do still have needles, but they’re stainless steel “microneedles” – many itty bitty tiny needles that can barely be felt. Put the patch on skin and – Voila! the dried measles vaccine releases into the body through the skin.

Now before you get too excited, these aren’t available yet and probably won’t be for several years. Right now, these patches have only been tested in rats. The measles vaccine, which researchers found could be dried and last at least 30 days without losing effectiveness, was dried onto the patches full of microneedles and then stored for a month. You can read about the process of preparing the vaccines here. Then they were applied to the rats. A test of the rats’ blood revealed that they were immunized against measles as well as if they had received a shot.

After animal testing, new products like these are tested on volunteers and then eventually in larger trials. Even so, it’s unlikely these will make it to major developed countries that already have effective measles vaccines. The MMR combined shot is already effective and makes more sense than giving a single measles vaccine.

So why have these researchers done this? Because outside of places like the U.S., Australia and Europe, measles still kills over a hundred thousand children every year. The 2010 death toll for this disease was 140,000, and measles remains the leading preventable cause of death among countries without comprehensive vaccination programs.

By developing a measles vaccine patch, low-skilled health workers without experience or training in giving injections could immunize larger numbers of children in developing countries without worrying about transmitting or contracting blood-borne illnesses. With these patches, fewer highly trained medical personnel are needed, the patches take up less shipping room than all the needles and syringes, refrigeration is no longer necessary for the vaccine and there are no needles or syringes for the health workers to worry about properly disposing. Microneedle vaccines, FTW!