Biodegradable particles enable multiple vaccinations in single injection

Typically, children are recommended to receive nine immunisation injections in their first year (five different vaccines covering 123 diseases with booster shots), and it’s fair to say that it’s rarely a pleasant experience for anyone. Massachusetts Institute of Technology medical engineering expert Prof Robert Langer — for some years the engineer most cited in primary research around the world and the 2015 winner of Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering — has led research that could see all those jabs combined into a single dose.

The key to the innovation is a microparticle that not only contains all the active ingredients of the immunisations, but releases them into the bloodstream in bursts at intervals that can be precisely timed by engineering how the particles are constructed, mimicking the way that the vaccines are given currently in separate doses but with only one traumatic needle.

In a paper in Science, Langer and Ana Jaklenec, a researcher at the Koch Centre for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, along with engineers Kevin McHugh and Thandh Nguyen, describe a process called stamped assembly of polymer layers (SEAL), inspired by fabrication techniques for microprocessors, that makes a structure similar in shape to a coffee cup with a lid on it.