‘Point and shoot’: Air ‘gun’ could deliver vaccines and other medication painlessly
This Nerf gun-like device may make injections safer, faster and easier
Could a puff of air one day replace the needle in delivering medicines and vaccines? These scientists are working on it.
Imagine if getting a shot felt like getting popped with a foam Nerf dart. That could be the case with a new drug-delivery system. It replaces needles with puffs of air.
This innovation could make vaccines faster, easier and cleaner.
“People really don’t seem to like needles,” notes Jeremiah Gassensmith. “That’s really why we invented this thing.”
Gassensmith studies bioengineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. His team’s new tech goes beyond patient comfort, though. The device quickly delivers drugs without touching the bloodstream. And that could reduce the risk of spreading disease. He tested it out on his own arm. It “felt like being shot with a Nerf dart,” he reports. “I could feel it, but it wasn’t painful.”
The technology works by blasting a puff of carbon dioxide, or CO2, through the skin. That gas carries a powder made of tiny bits of vaccine wrapped in metallic crystals. The crystal coating is “super robust and strong,” Gassensmith says. As a result, the vaccine powder does not have to be refrigerated while stored. Once in the body, the CO2 that carries the powder will mix with water.
This creates a weak acid. The acid dissolves the crystal shield. This releases bits of vaccine so that it can now enter the bloodstream.
The new device was inspired by “gene guns” used in agriculture. These shoot DNA directly into crops. Giving a plant those genetic instructions “temporarily tells the plant to do something,” Gassensmith explains. For example, “You can tell a plant to hold off on fruiting if you know a frost is coming.”
Gassensmith decided to build a homemade gene gun for fun. This was early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was spending a lot of time at home. In early tests, he shot table salt around his home office. But he soon realized his design could have a more practical use. When he was able to go back into the lab, Gassensmith adapted it into an air-based vaccine system.
His team described its device on March 27 in Indianapolis, Ind. It was at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society.
This gas-based drug delivery system may allow medicines to be puffed through the skin rather than injected with needles.
An improved design
This isn’t the first gas-based drug-delivery device. It is, however, an upgrade over past systems. For instance, tweaking the gas that carries the vaccine powder can customize how fast the tiny crystal capsules release the drug. Testing showed that the drug released fastest when delivered with carbon dioxide. Plain air, on the other hand, led to a slower, gentler release.
Vaccines work best when released slowly. That allows them longer contact with the immune system. But the team hopes the device could work for other medicines too. And some medicines must be released quickly. One such example is insulin, a crucial drug for many people with diabetes.
The new system is also cheaper than previous designs, which often used gold or other expensive metals to hold drugs, says Yalini Wijesundara. The new setup uses zinc,, which is fairly inexpensive. She’s a materials scientist who works with Gassensmith on this project.
CLICK HERE To test the injector’s ability to work with vaccines, the researchers used it to deliver proteins into mice. The test proteins were not real vaccines. These stand-ins let the researchers see how medicines delivered by the device would behave inside the body. To track the proteins inside a mouse, the researchers dyed them red. A vivid red glow under the microscope told the scientists that the proteins had released properly. The team initially shared its findings late last year in the Royal Society of Chemistry. Hurdles remain before this technology could replace needles in doctors’ offices, says Bruce Weniger. A doctor, he teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. He also studied vaccine technology for 30 years for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the 1960s, U.S. doctors tried delivering vaccines using needle-free liquid jets. But problems arose. The liquid could splatter off a patient’s skin. If that person was sick, that splashback could contaminate the tip of the vaccination device with germs and spread disease. Powdered vaccines could overcome that problem, Wijesundara now says. Solid material is less likely to bounce off the skin. ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3752615/ ) But more studies are needed to confirm splashback isn’t a concern, Weniger says. He also worries that gas-based vaccines might leave scars. That was a problem with older gas-based systems. Some visible metallic residue remained in the skin. Future research must also ensure that gas-delivered vaccines build immunity to disease as expected, Weniger says. So far, researchers have only tested that the system delivers medicine inside the body. This tech might even find use on farms — for livestock vaccines, Gassensmith says. “You don’t want to approach a cow with a big needle,” he reasons. The last few years have highlighted the importance of vaccines to safeguarding public health – but what if there was a better way to deliver the vaccine than with the dreaded needle? Researchers may have the answer – in the form of a jet that can puff a vaccine through the skin with just a small amount of pressure, a sensation they compare to being hit by a foam toy. The MOF-Jet, developed by scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas in the US, was presented to an audience at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society. The project’s principal investigator, Jeremiah Gassensmith, started tinkering with the idea during a COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. He ordered inexpensive pieces of a compressed gas-powered jet injection system and later passed them over to Yalini Wijesundara, a graduate student in the lab. Wijesundara, who presented the work at the meeting, had previously researched other jet injectors dating back to the 1960s that use compressed gas to inject a narrow stream of fluid. Thinking that if the injectors could be modified to fire solids, she thought they could be a delivery system for materials inside a metal-organic framework (MOF). These are porous, crystalline structures that act like molecular cages to encapsulate a wide variety of materials, including nucleic acids and proteins. By combining the jet injector with the lab’s existing work on MOFs, Wijesundara created the MOF-Jet, which can deliver powders to cells by shooting them in with air. Gassensmith’s group previously worked with the MOF called zeolitic-imidazolate framework eight, or ZIF-8. “Compared to gold, it’s cheap and protects biological materials, such as nucleic acids,” explained Wijesundara. “We can also store vaccine formulations within it as powders at room temperature, which eliminates the need for the extremely cold temperatures many liquid vaccines require”. The team encased a variety of biological materials within ZIF-8, which protected them from being broken down too quickly. They then modified a gene gun – which is typically used in veterinary medicine to fire genetic material or proteins into an animal’s cells – to create the MOF-Jet. A puff of gas fired the powdered formulation into cells, which Wijesundara said was as easy as “pointing and shooting”. They tested their system and showed that the MOF-Jet delivered a ZIF-8-encased gene to onion cells and a ZIF-8-encased protein to mice. According to Gassensmith, the blast from the injector just feels “like you got hit with a Nerf bullet” – much less painful than being stuck with a needle. The team also realised they could change the rate at which the cargo was released by altering the gas used. ZIF-8 is sensitive to acidic environments, and when carbon dioxide reacts with water in cells, it makes carbonic acid that, in turn, helps break apart the MOF. “If you shoot it with carbon dioxide, it will release its cargo faster within cells; if you use regular air, it will take four or five days,” she explained. This means that the same drug could be released over different timescales without changing its formulation. “Once we realised that, it opened up a lot of possibilities,” said Gassensmith. The team is now using this method to deliver chemotherapeutics and adjuvants as a potential treatment for melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer. They say that because the MOF-Jet can disperse material over a wide area, it could distribute a cancer therapeutic into a melanoma more evenly than with a needle, which is the current delivery method. Research is still ongoing, and the researchers believe the adaptability of their MOF-Jet could allow a wide number of applications, from veterinary medicine to agriculture, or someday even human vaccinations or treatments. A team of researchers has developed an inhalable vaccine that successfully protects against the COVID virus. It also opens the door to delivering other messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics for gene replacement therapy and other treatments in the lungs. Ref: https://seas.yale.edu/news-events/news/mrna-covid-vaccine-and-potentially-more-nanoparticles-no-shot-needed Researchers say this new ‘air vax’ method could ‘radically change the way people are vaccinated,’ but it could also be used to rapidly vaccinate the masses without their knowledge or consent. Ref: https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/new-air-vax-delivers-mrna-right-to-your-lungs-raising-serious-bioethical-concerns/ Source: ScienceNewsExplores, Euronews, Youtube Also Read: Not ready to go quite yet
Could a puff of air one day replace the needle in delivering medicines and vaccines? These scientists are working on it.
‘Point and shoot’
New ‘air vax’ delivers mRNA right to your lungs, raising serious bioethical concerns
STORY AT-A-GLANCE