Technology

58303 readers

31 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

739

Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles (www.newscientist.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

268 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

At first, the ultrasound pushed the mixture into the upper layers of skin, where the shape of the proteins caused vaccine-filled bubbles to form. As ultrasound kept hitting the skin, those bubbles burst and released the vaccine. As the experiment went on, the action of the bubbles breaking also cleared some dead skin cells, making the skin more permeable and allowing more and more vaccine molecules make it through.

A needle pushes vaccine molecules all the way into the muscles beneath the skin, while the ultrasound technique just delivers the vaccine to the upper layers of skin. But this more shallow process is sufficient for immunisation, says Dunn-Lawless.

In tests with live mice, the researchers found that while the ultrasound method delivered 700 times fewer molecules of vaccine than conventional jabs, the animals produced more antibodies. The researchers say that the mice didn’t show signs of pain and there was no visible damage to their skin.

Neat. I'm wondering about the effectiveness with thicker skin in humans.