Good news for people who hate needles: future vaccines could be delivered by a gentle puff of air to the arm. Scientists say the medicine being pushed through the skin, with just a little pressure, feels like being "hit with a Nerf bullet” - much less painful than a jab.
Using powdered vaccines that don’t require refrigeration and a system driven by compressed gas, they believe their “MOF-Jet” could easily deliver therapeutics against cancer and other diseases in a relatively painless way. The idea for the project was formed out of pandemic-induced boredom, according to principal investigator Professor Jeremiah Gassensmith.
Prof Gassensmith, of the University of Texas, had ordered cheap pieces of a compressed gas-powered jet injection system to mess around with while stuck at home. Later, after everyone was back on campus, he handed the pieces over to Yalini Wijesundara, a graduate student in the lab, with the instructions, “See what you can do with this.”
