Edible COVID-19 Vaccine Now In The Works So You Can Avoid The Needle
Image via QuickStrip
If you’ve gotten vaccinated, you’d have experienced the nervous wait before facing the needle. Not to mention, the soreness that hits your arm the day after. While we’re fortunate enough to have access to vaccinations, the downtime needed after a shot can be tedious.
Now, a Canadian biotech company is creating a brand-new solution to vaccine woes: a vaccine that dissolves in your mouth.
Rapid Dose Therapeutics has teamed up with McMaster University to develop an “oral strip” version of the COVID-19 vaccine, so you can avoid the needle.
By using the orally-dissolvable QuickStrip technology, the team believes proteins can be delivered through the inside of the cheek, or under the tongue, to recreate the same immune response as when you’re injected.
According to Complex, edible vaccines could have benefits aside from ease of access. Currently, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have to be stored between -15°C to -80°C (5°F to -112°F) at all times. However, with the edible QuickStrip, the vaccine can remain stable even at 40°C (104°F), not requiring to be refrigerated.
“60% or more of the countries are warm—Africa, Mexico. You think of all these countries that don’t have the logistics that we have in North America,” Mark Upsdell, CEO of Rapid Dose Therapeutics, told CBC Hamilton.
“You could put, whether it’s dengue or the follow-on influenza, the COVID vaccine into this strip and send that out to those countries that don’t have the infrastructure, [and] at a lower cost.”
Although the launch of the edible vaccine is still some time away, the National Research Council of Canada has supplied the team with the necessary protein needed to be infused into the QuickStrip for stage two of the testing, which will include animal trials.
Hopefully, in the near future, we’ll say goodbye to injections for good and simply pop an edible strip in our mouth instead.
[via Complex, cover image via QuickStrip]
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