Star Trek-inspired technology from Queensland drives Vaxxas' vision of a needleless world.
Vaxxas
Institution: Queensland University
Sector: Needleless Injections
Drawing on inspiration from Star Trek, Vaxxas, a Queensland University spin-out, has developed technology which could mean vaccine delivery via needles and syringes could soon be a thing of the past.
The World Economic Forum has now named the company a Technology Pioneer, along with 23 other startups such as the Raspberry Pi Foundation, makers of the eponymous cheap computer. Mark Kendall, inventor of the technology, will present at the forum’s next annual meeting in January 2015.
The nanopatch, based on research at the university’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, is, as the name suggests, a small patch which delivers vaccines painlessly and more efficiently than syringes.
Spun out by UniQuest, the university’s technology transfer office, Vaxxas’s technology consists of thousands of tiny projections which inject the vaccine directly into immune cells in the skin. A needle delivers the vaccine into the muscle, where much fewer immune cells are located.
The company is received funding from the World Health Organisation, on top of a $15m series A from 2011, to lend its technology to WHO’s polio vaccination efforts. Should Vaxxas get its nanopatch through clinical trials and regulatory approvals in 2015, the company will be part of a consortium trying to secure a polio-free world.
