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.
It’s not just the time we’ve saved here. Think of people on insulin that have to take shots multiple times a day.
The medical implications of this are massive it is absolutely a game changer.
If it ever comes into fruition.
We’ll have to wait and see how this impacts anything that needs to be injected deeper than skin level, which is why the focus is on vaccines.