The encyclopedia · Strategy & Leadership · Strategic decision · 2012
Vaxxas' Nanopatch delivers vaccines via dry microprojections, skipping cold chain
Mark Kendall's Nanopatch dry-coats vaccines onto microprojections that pierce skin, eliminating refrigeration and using a fraction of the dose.
Mark Kendall / University of Queensland, Vaxxas
the move
Vaccinating remote and hot-climate regions has long been throttled by the cold chain: liquid vaccines delivered by needle and syringe have to stay refrigerated continuously from the factory to the patient's arm, and any break in that chain — a failed fridge, a long truck ride on bad roads, a village clinic with unreliable power — wastes doses or renders them useless. Papua New Guinea, one of the regions worst affected, is roughly the size of France but had only about 800 refrigerators at the time, many not working or located far from the people who needed vaccines most.
The vaccine industry's standard answer to cold-chain failures has been to build more reliable cold-chain infrastructure — better refrigeration units, more resilient logistics, more backup power at rural clinics — treating the problem as one of infrastructure investment rather than questioning why the vaccine itself needed to be a refrigerated liquid delivered by needle into muscle tissue in the first place, the format the entire cold-chain problem existed to serve.
why it works
- Dry-coating removes the liquid state that required refrigeration, so the patch stays stable at room temperature.
- Microprojections reach immune-cell-rich skin layers directly, making delivery more efficient than muscle injection.
- Higher efficiency means a fraction of the dose is needed, cutting cost and supply burden.
- Skipping the cold chain removes the need for infrastructure investment in remote areas.
what transfers
Redesign the delivery point to match where the system works best, not just shore up the infrastructure the old method requires.
what came after
Beyond eliminating the cold-chain requirement, Kendall's team found the patch achieved full immunization using roughly one-tenth to one-fortieth of the vaccine dose required by a standard needle injection, because delivering into the skin's immune-cell-rich layers is a more efficient route to an immune response than injecting into muscle. Kendall won the 2012 Rolex Award for Enterprise, used the funding to field-test the Nanopatch in Papua New Guinea, and co-founded the company Vaxxas, which drew millions in investment and partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies, while the World Healt
references
- Skin patches instead of needles: can nanotechnology vaccinate the world?
- Fear of Needles? There's New Tech on the Way
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