In an interview, Kimberly Thompson, President of Kid Risk Inc., discusses her recent review of data on the feasibility of vaccine patches.

“The goal of the research was to understand and to characterize the advancement of the development of vaccine patches as a potential delivery technology," Thompson said. "Just imagine that in the future instead of physicians having to spend a lot of time calming patients and caregivers and children about getting an injection they could just hold a small patch or an applicator with a patch next to the skin and administer the vaccine intradermally very quickly and easily. This is now something that is a possibility given the current technology that exists.”

Thompson and colleagues performed a systematic literature review, finding 116 studies on vaccine patches. The studies covered a wide range of infectious diseases, including influenza, rotavirus, zika, HPV, and smallpox.

Using this data, researchers identified key platform issues for patch developers.

"One of the biggest challenges of course with vaccines is the important aspect that we do need to figure out the effective ways to stimulate the immune system. There are different strategies to do that. One of the design questions on the immunobiology side is what are the most effective ways to deliver vaccines that will in fact induce immunity and how does the vaccine patch technology change where the vaccine is delivered and how effectively," Thompson said.

The FluMist nasal spray vaccine for influenza indicates patients are interested in noninjectable delivery methods for vaccines. Thompson suggests vaccine patch manufacturers face complex obstacles to develop, test and bring the devices to market. Patient and clinic interest will be key to driving manufacturers, Thompson added.

“For them it’s not necessarily an easy strategy if they don’t have a clear signal from consumers, the market, that this is something people are willing to pay a little more for maybe or really interested in having.  I think right now we’re at this interesting point where we have enough evidence based on the research that has been done, and our review shows this, to really think that this is an exciting platform. The real question is can we get to a commercially licensed products from here and how do we best do that” Thompson said.

"It’s really hard to know whether this will in fact be a disruptive technology that will really change the market in a significant way or not at this point in time. I think that the idea that we might be able to develop vaccines that have some significant benefits that are so substantial that we would be willing to invest what is required to get to a broader disruption of the market so that we’re delivering more vaccines with a vaccine patch platform than by syringe and needle," Thompson said.

References:

Badizadegana, Kamran, et al. The potential role of using vaccine patches to induce immunity: platform and pathways to innovation and commercialization. Expert Review of Vaccines, 2020. doi: 10.1080/14760584.2020.1732215.
Images: Getty Images and Taylor & Francis.  

Credit: 
By Adam Hochron and Steve Oteri