The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated more than $21 million towards developing a vaccine technology that uses a tattoo-like mechanism which injects invisible nanoparticles under the skin that is now being tested in a vaccine against the virus that causes COVID-19
The microneedle technology is also being wed to injectable technology, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which embeds under the skin a vaccination record visible by near infrared light that can be read by smartphone technology.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding the technologies with aims to enable them in “house-to-house” vaccine campaigns undertaken by people with “minimal training.”
Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh reported in their study published April 1 in EBiomedicine, a Lancet Journal, that their microneedle patch vaccine against the SARS CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 “prompted robust antibody production in the mice within two weeks.”
The patches resemble a spiky piece of Velcro, with hundreds of tiny microneedles made of sugar. The needles prick just into the skin and quickly dissolve, releasing the vaccine into the tiny abrasions and inducing a potent immune cell response despite the minute amount of the vaccine material – far more potent than an intramuscular injection.
Another study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and published in December, 2019 by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the Global Good, Intellectual Ventures Laboratory in Bellevue, WA, describes how “near-infrared quantum dots” can be implanted under the skin along with a vaccine to encode information for “decentralized data storage and bio-sensing.”
“To maximize the utility of this technology for vaccination campaigns, we aimed to create a platform compatible with microneedle-delivered vaccines that could reliably encode data on an individual for at least five years after administration,” said the MIT paper, titled Biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots delivered to the skin by microneedle patches record vaccination. “In addition, this system also needed to be highly biocompatible, deliver a sufficient amount of dye after an application time of 2 min or less, and be detectable using a minimally adapted smartphone.”
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