Abstract
Transdermal vaccination route using biodegradable microneedles is a rapidly progressing field of research and applications. The fear of painful needles is one of the primary reasons most people avoid getting vaccinated. Therefore, developing an alternative pain-free method of vaccination using microneedles has been a significant research area. Microneedles comprise arrays of micron-sized needles that offer a pain-free method of delivering actives across the skin. Apart from being pain-free, microneedles provide various advantages over conventional vaccination routes such as intramuscular and subcutaneous. Microneedle vaccines induce a robust immune response as the needles ranging from 50 to 900 μm in length can efficiently deliver the vaccine to the epidermis and the dermis region, which contains many Langerhans and dendritic cells. The microneedle array looks like band-aid patches and offers the advantages of avoiding cold-chain storage and self-administration flexibility. The slow release of vaccine antigens is an important advantage of using microneedles. The vaccine antigens in the microneedles can be in solution or suspension form, encapsulated in nano or microparticles, and nucleic acid-based. The use of microneedles to deliver particle-based vaccines is gaining importance because of the combined advantages of particulate vaccine and pain-free immunization. The future of microneedle-based vaccines looks promising however, addressing some limitations such as dosing inadequacy, stability and sterility will lead to successful use of microneedles for vaccine delivery. This review illustrates the recent research in the field of microneedle-based vaccination.
Highlights
Infectious diseases have been prevalent in human history for centuries
The Mantoux technique is the traditional intradermal administration method; an improved or first-generation intradermal administration technique involving solid microneedles in a NanopatchTM comprising 10,000 micro projections/cm2 each 250 μm long enhanced the antigenicity of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine administered
Therapeutic cancer vaccine administered using a digitally controlled hollow microneedle injection system required significantly less antigen as compared to traditional intradermal injection. This unique hollow microneedle system composed of silica achieved automated micro-injections (0.25–10μL) to deliver a synthetic long peptide HPV E7 [43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63] derived from HPV encapsulated in cationic liposomes
Summary
Infectious diseases have been prevalent in human history for centuries. Vaccines fall into three groups: whole pathogen vaccine, subunit vaccine, and nucleic acid vaccine [2]. Inactivated vaccines are whole pathogen vaccines that involve the inactivation of the Micromachines 2021, 12, 435. A publication from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that between 1994–2013, vaccines prevented over 320 million illnesses, 21 million hospitalizations, and 732,000 premature deaths, saving at least $295 billion in medical costs [3]. The most recent example is the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that has infected about 90.4 million people resulting in over 1.94 million deaths worldwide as of December 2020. Continuous research and development on vaccine antigens and vaccine delivery are necessary for combatting future pandemics caused by novel and fast-evolving infectious diseases
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