NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Georgia Tech professor Mark Praunitz has spent two decades developing microneedle patches.

These are very tiny needles that dissolve into your skin to painlessly deliver vaccines against viruses like polio and the flu.

To see the needles, you have to get really close and squint.

Prausnitz shows off about a dozen patches in his office.

“If your eyes are good you can see 100 little spots,” Prausnitz says. “And if your eyes were really good or if you used a microscope, you would then zoom in and see that each of those little spots corresponds to an inverted cone.”

The silver cones are crammed into 1 square-inch on the patch. The cones hold the vaccines.