A Microneedle Vaccine Patch Printer For Thermostable MRNA Vaccines

What if you could get vaccinated with the ease of putting on an adhesive bandage? This is the promise of microneedle patches (MNP), which are essentially what they sound like. These would also have uses in diagnostics that might one day obliviate the need for drawing blood. The one major issue with MNPs is their manufacturing, which has been a laborious and highly manual process. In a recent paper in Nature Biotechnology researchers detail the construction and testing of a MNP printer, or microneedle vaccine printer (MVP) that can print dissolving polymers containing stabilized mRNA vaccine.

These mRNA strands are as usual encapsulated in a liquid nanoparticle container, which is mixed with the soluble and biocompatible polymer. This mixture is then added to a mold and dried, after which it retains the microneedle structure of the mold. On tests involving pig skin, the MNPs were capable of penetrating the skin and delivering the vaccine contained in the needles. Produced patches were shown to be shelf-stable for at least six months, which would make these ideal for vaccine distribution in areas where refrigeration and similar are problematic.

Using MNPs for delivering vaccines has previously been researched for e.g. delivering rotavirus and poliovirus vaccine, and a 2021 study in Nature Biomedical Engineering looked at the viability of using MNPs to rapidly sample protein biomarkers in interstitial fluid, which could make diagnostics for certain biomarkers as uncomplicated as putting on the patch, removing it and examining it, removing the need for drawing blood or sampling large amounts of interstitial fluid for external analysis.

If the concept of the MVP and similar MNP printers can be commercialized, it might make it possible to strongly shorten the supply chain for vaccines in less developed regions, while also enabling diagnostics that are very costly and cumbersome today.

95 thoughts on “A Microneedle Vaccine Patch Printer For Thermostable MRNA Vaccines

  1. Why would I want to become a GMO (genetically modified organism) by having foreign mRNA injected into me?

    For decades parents have been demanding non-GMO foods for consumption,
    I guess they have given up the fight and decided it was okay for their children and themselves to become GMOs.
    If you can’t beat them, join them?

    1. Your body already has a massive amount of non-human genetic material in it in the form of gut flora, plus mitochondrial DNA also of non-human origin and several other examples. The people that do not want genetically modified food and shout about it don’t even have the faintest concept that all the food they eat has been domesticated and has “modified” genetics already from that. Plus your own genes are not easy as static as once thought, what with epi generic modification ongoing. But they are often the same group that say scientists (or doctors) don’t take them seriously.

      1. “The people that do not want genetically modified food and shout about it don’t even have the faintest concept that all the food they eat has been domesticated and has “modified” genetics already from that.”

        Really? Do you believe today’s gene editing and hybridization are the same thing or did you just weave a lie in there to belittle people concerned with gene edited plants and animals they may consume?

        Switching on animal proteins in a plant is not hybridization no matter how hard you type.

        1. I think the anti GMO movement really needs to thinks rethink there strategy. Telling people that currently genetic manipulation techniques are somehow intrinsically less safe than previous techniques is a non starter. I think it would be far more effective to concentrate on how GMOs are being used. The majority of GMOs sold to farmers have 2 potential modifications. The are modified to be round up resistant or they are modified to produce chemicals that kill pests. In the USA every year farmers put 300 million pounds of pure glyphosate on our food, that’s billions of gallons worth of roundup. I think people are concerned about billions of gallons of roundup on their food. Banning glyphosate would be a huge blow to GMO food, Monsanto gets most of their profits from their roundup ready line.

          1. So.. you want to do a good thing… get cancer causing Roundup out of our food.

            But you don’t want to do it to actually help people.

            You want to do it as a back-door way to move people towards banning a technology that can be used to eliminate hunger and malnutrition by making crops contain missing vitamins, bigger, drought and disease resistant, etc…

            What a POS you must be. I suppose kids going blind from vitamin A deficiency makes you happy? Is it because it keeps people in other parts of the world down… right where you want them?

            https://www.goldenrice.org/

            Anti-GMO, Anti-Vax just like every other Anti-Science.. y’all suck

    2. There is a common misunderstanding about the science in the mRNA class of vaccines. Vaccines as we knew them before worked by injecting a weakened form of a virus into you. your body, which has been fighting viruses from the moment you were conceived, sees the say prey, and as always – takes notes on how to kill it. but it takes resources and trial and error – and on extremely rare occasion, the weakened form of the virus is still enough to infect you to a dangerous level. If I were to make an analogy the classic form of vaccination was like locking a toddler in a room and saying “you can’t come out until you figure out how to tie your shoes.” What tied shoes are, what success looks like, and how to get there is all steps the tot must figure out. It could take a child a decade to figure this lesson out.

      and so too your body spends a comparable amount of time solving the mystery of this new virus. It produces and launches millions of white blood cells to figure this new infection out.

      Now to extend my metaphor – mRNA vaccines are like giving a kid velcro shoes and a YouTube video explaining EXACTLY how to use them. the mRNA – which is already a thing you body has enormous quantity is simply instructions. “If you see this guy? you know he doesn’t belong here. you can kill him by making this protein:”

      That’s it. That’s all it does. an infection enters. your white blood cell factory spins up, sends a legion of soldiers, and makes the protein the signs posted before told them to make.

      You are not modified. you are taught. on a cellular level. If teaching someone modifies them is a question for philosophers, but scientifically That’s the story.

      I’m happy to answer any further questions about this amazing advancement in medical treatment.

        1. I’m sure the myocarditis and huge upswing in “unexplained deaths” is accidental, too.

          Meanwhile, you can still get (and spread) what you’re “protected against”, despite your perpetual booster subscription.

          1. Wow, an upswing in deaths after a novel virus spreads. Who would have thought that was possible?

            Oh no, it’s still possible to get and spread it? It must be so scary living in binary land where something must either fully 100% work with no exception or doesn’t work at all. Antivaxers are so stupid!

            https://youtu.be/vydgkCCXbTA

          1. No. Making yourself unnecessarily susceptible to disease which may both harm yourself and incubate within yourself to spread to others is not caution. It’s exactly the opposite of that.

            Want to evaluate modern medicine for yourself? Go to an old graveyard and read the dates on the tombstones. Then get yourself to the doctor and have all the shots you missed by doing your own sit-on-the-toilette research before you make someone sick.

        2. Since we reached the thread limit, I thought I’d address your illusory superiority here:

          Overall death rate is more or less the same. Less car accidents and related accidental deaths because people were forced inside due to hopeless over-regulation and government overreach. The bulk of “novel virus” deaths were due to comorbidities, not the virus itself. These facts are supported by the CDCs actual data, so knock yourself out.

          Treat it like any other product that’s pimped on wall-to-wall media coverage: if Dyson sponsored all the sensationalist news media segments while instructing you to buy a Dyson vacuum, and you found that it DIDN’T WORK AS DESCRIBED (and worse, led to other issues like burning your house down), you’d rail against it and complain that you were hoodwinked. Unfortunately, that would require at least some measure of honest introspection.

          But, because special interest groups convinced you that it was the right thing to do — for their profits and MASSIVE wealth transfer — you accept it as an axiom, while insulting those that dare to think for themselves.

          Branch Covidians are a special breed, I suppose. Best of luck with your “new or worsening heart failure”.

          1. Soo… you couldn’t figure out how to make a living after the world changed and that means Covid didn’t actually kill. Got it.

            Everything changes eventually even without a pandemic. Learn to do something different from what you did before.

        3. > Soo… you couldn’t figure out how to make a living after the world changed and that means Covid didn’t actually kill. Got it.

          > Everything changes eventually even without a pandemic. Learn to do something different from what you did before.

          … What? In what universe does that even remotely address anything I said? Plot twist: you can’t address my actual contentions so you raise a strawman to attack, because you lack intellectual honesty. Surprise!

          Psst… your credulity is showing.

          1. People going on spouting anti-science and claiming that it’s all just a “transfer of wealth”… clearly someone just trying to justify their own financial failure.

        4. > People going on spouting anti-science and claiming that it’s all just a “transfer of wealth”… clearly someone just trying to justify their own financial failure.

          Ah, more abject nonsense propped up by conjecture and a total lack of intellectual honesty. You can’t address my points, so you resort to special pleading. Par for the course, really.

          Your ego isn’t doing you any favors.

          Speaking of wealth transfers, though… remind me, during the “pandemic”, which company’s stock was enthusiastically traded by members of Congress, and how much money did that company make? Meanwhile, how many laws and regulations did those same “public servants” pass limiting what everyone else could do?

          You “ˡᵉᴬʳⁿ ᵀᵒ ᶜᴼᵈᵉ” types have no logical consistency. Your ilk abhors massive multinational capitalist conglomerates… until the massive multinational capitalist conglomerates capitalize on your fears and uses you to enact their will.

          “Seethe Enthusiastically Alongside the Machine” has a nice ring to it. Best of luck to you!

          1. Congress people took advantage of their knowledge of a situation to further their own wealth.

            OMG, that’s such a shock, I would never expect them to do that in a situation where the company in question was about to release a vaccine that truly helped against a virus that was really spreading and harming people. Clearly they would only do that if something about it all was a scam.

            What a jackass!

          1. I know right? If you have to do it more than once it clearly doesn’t work or is some kind of conspiracy. Those in the know take one breath as a baby then never again!

          1. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/13/5/719 but beside this, but worse part is not following data (bedrock of science) please show us mortality benefit in vaccinated group (data intentionally not presented all over media, but of more importance) in double blind RCT (not that observational crap and data relay OWiD spreading same) start here: https://imgbb.com/3m73pMk source table S4: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2021/07/28/2021.07.28.21261159/DC1/embed/media-1.pdf which group has more dead in spite of 1000 more cases of covid, science…right

          2. @zegarac – haven’t read your links, will do so. Just wanted to ask, why with the anti-vaxers is it always 100% about mortality? We have a lot of people out there whose quality of life has been vastly diminished by Long Covid symptoms. We don’t understand why, how to fix it or if they will ever even get better. That’s important too!

          3. @zegarac – Read the first one. The mechanism it describes has been seen. It has been seen in the COVID virus itself! It has not been seen in the vaccine. By not getting vaccinated one makes themselves more likely to have COVID genes reverse transcribed into their cells, not the other way around. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10057545/

            Even if all things were equal between the virus and the vaccine, at least the vaccine contains only the gene for the spikes, not the whole viral genome. But they aren’t equal. Billions have been infected. Billions have been vaccinated. This mechanism of reverse transcription has only been seen from the virus, not the vaccine.

          4. @zegarac – looked at the other two links.

            In a study of 21,926 people >=16 y/o 4 vaccinated and 1 unvaccinated died of Cardiac arrest.

            Ok, first off that’s not a great sample size.
            Second.. 4? 4 people? That’s not a statistic, that’s noise!

            I mean… I honestly tried to give you the benefit of the doubt when I first saw your chart. Wow.. that bar is so much higher than the rest.. maybe I really should be concerned… But I assumed the numbers were reduced by some scale for easier reading. So I read on. No. It’s 4 people. 4 people dropping dead of cardiac arrest out of 21,926 would not have made anyone suspicious before 2019. It’s not an aberration from the norm that needs any explanation. That’s just life!

      1. They don’t. They get inside the cell and start expressing a protein (which is what genes do). They change your body’s protein production, therefore making you a GMO. Often enough, they will do so at the expense of proper cellular functions. Autopsies have shown that on some people, internal organs e.g. liver, pancreas, etc. were overburdened producing the spike protein.

      2. They don’t. They cannot. In humans information is one way from you DNA, then the RNA message then to proteins and enzymes. That is what is called the Central Dogma.
        The vaccine is RNA. It only acts down stream as explained above.
        And before anyone starts pointing out all exceptions and gotcha moments regarding the Central Dogma, I know already. Trust me, I know but the above is a reasonable first pass at the fundamentals of biochemistry. The exceptions can wait for grad school.

          1. Not arbitrary, well planned out to help the recipient actually. Look it up, an article containing and explaining the source code was linked to and discussed right here on this site!

          2. “So, no bugs in the code? None whatsoever? You sure?”

            I’ll leave that for a geneticist. But how is that even the question?

            On the one side you have a virus that has evolved to invade living cells and has only recently hopped species to homo-sapiens.

            On the other side vs something that was engineered to protect against that virus.

            Even if you don’t have complete confidence in the makers of the vaccine how can you have more confidence that something which has evolved to harm you will not be more damaging than any mistake they might have made. One has an intention to help you (even if that is ultimately just to get money). The other can’t really be said to have any intention but it’s function is to harm you.

            Granted, a well evolved parasite will be less harmful to it’s host species because it does not benefit from the host dying but being that it only recently made the jump to human this virus is not even a well evolved parasite yet! It is code meant to co-exist with another, not-fully-compatible system to our own and we are still finding out exactly what the side effects of that are.

            The leap the anti-vaxer’s brain must make to get from distrust of scientists trying to help to trust in a virus that is evolved to harm… It’s mind boggling!

    3. I think I would rather just get a shot, know the full dosage is injected and not have to wear a patch. But I do see the value in it.

      Make that patch extra strong and sticky. Place it over the holes in the antivaxers’ heads to stop more brain from spilling out.

      Two birds with one stone FTW!

      Maybe also fill the antivaxer’s patch with the drugs they use to chemically neuter child molesters.

      Now you have the perfect “make this a better world” trifecta!

      1. So your response to people who are wary about being possibly injected with harmful chemicals… is to intentionally inject them with harmful chemicals? Great job!

          1. Plenty of useful drugs have later turned out to be harmful, when “the science” at the time assured everyone it was perfectly safe. This is the “possibly injected with harmful chemicals” part. I see you fail to address the part where he advocates chemically castrating people.

          2. “Plenty of useful drugs have later turned out to be harmful”

            This is true. But deceptive.

            Go take a walk in an old cemetery from before modern medicine. Read the tombstones. Look how young those people were. Compare it to new cemetery. Clearly those cases where modern medicine harms are FAR in the minority compared to when it helps. They just make better, more memorable stories.

            The fewer of those people trying so hard to drag us into the past of short sickly lives the better! We don’t need to re-learn that lesson every couple generations. Just keep moving forward.

    4. With mRNA vaccines the “genetic modification” is temporary – the cells which have ben modified to produce COVID-9 spike proteins either die or lose this modification after some time. Every time you get infected with COVID-19 or any other virus you are temporarily becoming a GMO using your terminology. Some people with genetic diseases like MS may someday opt to become permanently genetically modified to correct their DNA but it doesn’ sound like you will be one of them.

      1. I don’t know if there is an accepted, universal, agreed upon term for Genetically Modified Organism. But an mRNA vaccine doesn’t modify genes. Human genome is DNA. So by my read, it in no way is making you a Genetically Modified Organism in any way, at any time, in any capacity. Baking a loaf of bread from a recipe does not modify the recipe. It is a one way street.

    5. I don’t like the experimental nature of MNRA vaccines either, but to be fair, it’s messenger RNA and does not splice permanently into you actual DNA as I understand it.
      So in other words you would not be a ‘GMO’ as such.
      Still though, this kind of development gives me concern that they might use it at some point to somehow force stuff into people since it does not penetrate with a needle and that somehow lowers the barrier to such shenanigans.

        1. Or citations are actively suppressed on major/social media,
          You know, like how Twitter used to suppress (i.e. cancel) opinions its former directors disagreed with.

          1. Oh please. To make it more in line with the topic of this site.. you dumbasses would say E=I/R because it is your right to believe so and if someone didn’t let you post that on their site was infringing on your first amendment rights.

            Wrong is wrong, harmful is harmful.

          1. Sure baseline fallacy in covid cases for comps, and underreporting factor in vaccine SAE case sounds like double whammy (both somehow turn out to benefit vaccine), and when you TEST ALL (like measure) this is the result: https://anishkokamd.substack.com/p/vaccine-myocarditis-update-from-thailand so >2% hospitalized kids with elevated troponin is lie? lets see ah https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.107.722975 “Cardiac troponin (cTn) has established itself firmly as the “gold standard” in the diagnosis of ACS.” 3 in hospital out of 301, 7 with heart damage and 4 with no symptoms, what could go wrong, lie you say?

          2. @zegarac – which myocarditis problem are we talking about?

            If we are talking about the short term minor inflamation that occurs mostly in young people and boys in particular that was openly reported on by pretty much all sources shortly after the vaccines came out then sure, I take it back it’s not a lie. Also not much of a problem and not very important. Why talk about that?

            Most don’t even notice symptoms and it just goes away within a week. Your own source you linked even shows this. I’m looking right at the first table in the beginning. “(all boxes shaded in orange are myocarditis rates that are higher than what is expected in the population)”. All the orange is in the 0-7 days, none is in the 8-21 day section. Later the text even says that they got better and the heart tissue did not scar. The author throws around the word damage, probably trying to be scary but fails to demonstrate damage.

            Or were you talking about the right-wing vaccinated people are dropping dead all over the place story. That’s what I was talking about.

            I stand behind that being bullshit. It’s a lot of anecdotal oooh someone died, must be the vaccine crap cause I want to believe it’s the vaccine… and really dumb statistics like that 4 people out of over 21,000 suffering from cardiac arrest statistic you mentioned elsewhere. No, I’m not sure what the usual percentage to suffer that during the time of the study is but even if 4 is high, with numbers like 4 you don’t have enough sample size to say it is anything beyond noise.

            As for the claims of under reporting… Really? It’s quite the opposite. Everything that happens to a vaccinated person must be reported in VAERS. Which is good… because when something goes wrong it’s hard to say exactly what caused it. If a vaccine or medication for example did cause heart failure that’s not going to necessarily leave a mark on the body indicating it is any different from natural hear failure. Not trying to guess what is and isn’t vaccine caused, recording it all then comparing those stats to how many unvaccinated people are experiencing similar problems is useful.

            But the anti-vaccine crowd points at that and says look, all those vaccinated people died… Even vaccinated people ran over by cars are recorded there! So, no, it’s all reported. At least in the US. Then the willfully ignorant mi-interpret that information to make it look like vaccines cause everything!

    1. I remember seeing this technology over twenty years ago. A BBC tv show called, “Tomorrow’s world”. It was inspired by stinging nettle leaves, but if I recall, it was aimed at things like pain relief.
      I’ve got a feeling it’s probably not backed up to youtube.

      1. The truth… like that reverse transcription is something that happens in retro-virus infections? That mRNA vaccines are not even viruses let alone retroviruses and that they do not have the necessary machinery to perform reverse transcription?

    2. There is the Salem hypothesis that says most people espousing creationism while claiming an advance degree tend to be engineers.

      I suspect that there might corollary to covid antivax movement.

      Hackers and security experts are used to looking for security exploits, are self-trained to be extremely paranoid about “mega-corporations”, and are distrustful of anything they get told, repeatedly, without proof. (see FUD, or any company claiming “no, we werent hacked. Believe us, please?”)

      As a result, and since they do understand how code works in ideal systems, they are able to predict, and panic, over things that may not even happen. Like “a bug in the vaccine” or “the vaccine reprogramming people”.

      The problem I haven’t seen any antivaxers confront is their own desire for open source and pubkic review. The vaccine data has mostly been open and public; the same “many eyes” that help Linux are also helping keep the vaccine safe. But because these coders are not geneticists, and don’t understand the whole process of how an mRNA vaccine works, they are easily mislead by a few bad actors who are making serious bank off the antivax movement.

  2. Whether or not it works, whether or not it is acceptable it al boils down to customer TRUST – and that has LONG gone out the window.

    This form of administration may well become defacto but that doesn’t necessarily follow that it will be accepted.

    1. Why would he want to do that? His current methods have already been effective. A bandage leaves much more obvious physical evidence than dropping something into the victim’s tea or spraying it on their underwear.

      Sounds like just another anti-tech FUD idea to me.

        1. They also shot a guy with a poisoned BB. And dosed someone’s tea. And have had “unrelated terrorists” commit the crimes instead of government officials.

          Slapping something on someone’s arm (leg, back, whatever) is a very noticeable activity. The one thing that any government agent wants to avoid is being noticed. Notice how (ha) no one is certain which waiter or cook or bus boy slipped something into Litvinenko’s tea?

          1. If.
            If it was actually poisoned tea, to which we only have the word of other spies to rely on. I don’t know about you, but I’m not in the habit of trusting spies, regardless of who is signing their paycheck.

    1. Well, y’all demanded that even totally digital workers go back to the office and share germs so yes. My body, my choice not to be exposed to your diseases that you chose to be vulnerable to.

      1. But I thought the takeaway was as follows:

        “Everything changes eventually even without a pandemic. Learn to do something different from what you did before.”

        You’re irony impaired, aren’t you?

          1. Reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit, is it?

            Once again, you can’t address actual contentions, so you resort to special pleading, strawmanning, tu quoque (and other ad hominem), and even the genetic fallacy.

            I’ll slow walk you there if I have to.

          2. Your points were that you don’t consider people with comorbidities as counting. And you think it was all some sort of scam to take your money. What do you want him to address? The fact that people with pre-existing conditions have value and their lives matter too? If you don’t already know that it’s pretty hopeless.

        1. We’ve had mandatory vaccinations in public schools in the more developed states since forever. The anti-science people lost that argument a long time ago. “Your choice ends where my body begins” works both ways. You shouldn’t get to expose others’ bodies to viri that you chose to incubate just because you don’t like science.

          1. Yes. When I was a kid, nobody complained about vaccine, or not publicly. I didn’t like the needle, but never feared the vaccine.

            And I’ve never gotten smallpox or whatever else I was vaccinated for.

            Some of this overlooks the fact that some of us could get quite sick. Nobody cares about me, but government did worry about overloading the hospitals. Some surgery has been postponed.

          2. >We’ve had mandatory vaccinations in public schools in the more developed states since forever.
            Yes, and that’s wrong too.

            >You shouldn’t get to expose others’ bodies to viri that you chose to incubate just because you don’t like science.
            I should.

          3. Those mandatory vaccines all had a long safety track record before becoming mandatory. In the UK they waited until they had 20 years of safety data before even mandating them for doctors in public hospitals. Also, were dealing with a novel methodology of action, a novel delivery method, novel supply chain requirements, and as we can see with the bad batch reports, novel quality control challenges. Caution is warrented. Added to that the massive (over 1000x) age/risk variation, a lack of of caution in the low risk groups, especially in the absence of sterilizing immunity, is basically reckless and negligent endangerment.

    1. This 2022 pre-print should be pretty close to what you’re asking for:

      Bedir Alihsan, Arrianna Mohammed, Yash Bisen, Janice Lester, Christian Nouryan, “The Efficacy of Facemasks in the Prevention of COVID-19: A Systematic Review”
      https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.28.22278153

      “The probability of getting COVID-19 for mask wearers was 7% (97/1463, p=0.002), for non-mask wearers, probability was 52% (158/303, p=0.94). The Relative Risk of getting COVID-19 for mask wearers was 0.13 (95% CI: 0.10-0.16).

      Based on these results, we determined that across healthcare and community settings, those who wore masks were less likely to contact COVID-19. Future investigations are warranted as more information becomes available.”

      1. You forgot to include the sentences before that which are critical.
        They said out of 1732 studies reviewed, they only included 13 studies and only like 250 people got COVID, and that’s what they used for their conclusion. Also that’s realllllly sketch already. That’s super low for a disease with millions of patients. Then they don’t mention where the numbers you quoted above come from, i.e. the denominator. It’s just a really, really bad abstract. So bad that the conclusion may or may not be valid but please don’t take that out of context.

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