Vaccines can be delivered through the skin using ultrasound. This method doesn’t damage the skin and eliminates the need for painful needles. To create a needle-free vaccine, Darcy Dunn-Lawless at the University of Oxford and his colleagues mixed vaccine molecules with tiny, cup-shaped proteins. They then applied liquid mixture to the skin of mice and exposed it to ultrasound – like that used for sonograms – for about a minute and a half.
As with all new inventions/procedures, this is just the first step. The process will become faster and more efficient in the future.
In my opinion, this is a great first step towards a Star Trek-like hypospray.