Are you scared of injections and syringes? Australian and UK scientists have developed a patch to deliver vaccines through the skin.

The patch consists of micropillars attached to silicon wafers for dermal penetration. In this RSC Advances article, the researchers have produced patches with a high projection density (20,000 cm-2) by using controlled mixed plasma in a deep reactive ion etching process to produce long tapered tips without limiting the overall feature density. With this tailored process, the team fabricated structures of tuneable shape and height with high uniformity across the face of the silicon wafers.

They also showed that the patch can be used to extract specific biomarker samples from the skin.

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Reference:

High density and high aspect ratio solid micro-nanoprojection arrays for targeted skin vaccine delivery and specific antibody extraction

Derek Jenkins, Simon Corrie, Christopher Flaim and Mark Kendall

RSC Adv., 2012, Advance Article, DOI: 10.1039/C2RA20153D