Soon, pain-less vaccinations!

Team L&M

Remember how much you dreaded taking your little one for a vaccination shot as you couldn’t bear the poor baby crying with pain after the injection needle pierced through its delicate skin? But this scenario may soon be one of the past.

Doctoral student Dev Gurera at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio under the guidance of Dr Bharat Bhushan (The Ohio State University, Columbus) and Prof Navin Kumar (Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar) has found a way for doing painless vaccination.

Conventionally, when a vaccination shot is administered, you feel a sting at that location. However, when a mosquito bites you, there is no such sensation. It is only after a while that you either get a burning sensation or/ and some inflammation.

Taking a page out of the mosquitoes manual on The Painless Pierce, Gurera has found that similar application can be used to vaccinate humans so that there is no feeling of pain when a vaccination is being administered.

Gurera has published a research paper, Lessons From Mosquitoes’ Painless Piercing, in the Journal of the Mechanical Behaviour of Biomedical Materials. Based on the same a mosquito-inspired microneedle has been also been proposed.