News
Stephen McInerney is awarded a scholarship from the Health Research Board
Second year student, Stephen McInerney was successful in obtaining a HRB Summer Studentship – his project is entitled “Examining vaccine delivery with microneedle patches to human skin”. Stephen will undertake this project with Dr. Anne Moore’s group at the School of Pharmacy, UCC. Stephen will investigate how much vaccine is delivered into human skin using a novel vaccine delivery technology called ImmuPatch.
Vaccination represents the primary public health measure to combat infectious diseases. However limitations of cold-chain storage, vaccine wastage and sharps-waste add unsustainable logistic costs to immunisation programmes. ImmuPatch is a dissolvable microneedle-based skin patch technology that is being designed to overcome these obstacles. Adenoviruses are one of the most potent vaccine platforms tested to date in humans and they are being developed to prevent diseases such as malaria, HIV and Ebola virus. The ImmuPatch research group have developed methods of stably formulating vaccines, including adenovirus-based vaccines, into microneedles to produce immunogenic vaccine-containing dissolvable microneedles (DMN), which release the vaccine into the skin subsequent to their insertion. In this project I will quantify how much of the adenovirus vaccine is delivered into ex vivo skin.