Skin Patch To Painlessly And Quickly Deliver Cancer Medications

The researchers from MIT have come up with a fast-acting skin patch which can efficiently deliver medications to attack melanoma cells, a deadly skin cancer.

Accordingly, medications can be imparted to the patient's skin by the topical ointment but only in a short distance.

Although syringes are known as an effective way to deliver drugs, they are painful. In addition, they can cause inconvenience for the patients as well, which results in non-compliance.

According to Yanpu He, a graduate who helped with the device's development, the skin patch features a special chemical coating and action mode, allowing the device to be attached and taken away from our skin within a minute, but still deliver medications into the skin.

In addition, the researchers believed that the patch that was already tested in human and mice skin samples is a breakthrough basis to develop a vaccine for melanoma treatment.

Yanpu He also added that the skin patches offer a strong antibody response when tested in living mice and are promising in producing a robust immune response in our skin.

The researcher team used chicken ovalbumin as a model antigen and vaccinated tested mice with the patches. Then they made the comparison in the results with subcutaneous and intramuscular injections.

Microneedle patches produced 160 times and 9 times antibody level compared to subcutaneous injections for measles treatment and intramuscular injections used for flu treatment respectively. In addition, the method also proved its effectiveness in immune activation in the surgical human skin samples.

As per Paula T. Hammond from MIT, we can take advantage of the technology of using skin patch to impart vaccines against several kinds of infectious diseases. She added:

The researchers plan to present their findings at the ACS Fall 2019 National Meeting & Exposition taking place in San Diego in California from 25 to 29 August.