The quest to make a needle-less vaccine

Just about all of us appreciate the health benefits of vaccination, even if few enjoy the sensation of getting a jab. While children and animals are most notorious for expressing resistance to inoculation, adults don't exactly look forward to the experience either. Yet despite the considerable recent advances made in vaccine platform technology — including the development of smaller, less painful needles — the trypanophobic among us might feel that there will never be a future in which "vaccine" and "ouchie" don't automatically go together.

Yet for decades, a group of enterprising biomedical engineers have bene working to figure out the answer to this question: Can we design vaccines without needles, that still inoculate a patient with a serum that enters the bloodstream?