On Aug. 26, 2020, UConn announced that Thanh Duc Nguyen, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering had received $432,990 contract from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to develop a single-use, self-administered microneedle vaccine technology for infectious diseases such as COVID-19, which can be quickly distributed at home in an epidemic or pandemic to provide effective, long-term protection.

Thanh Duc Nguyen, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering, and Associate Professor Steve Szczepanek in the Department of Pathobiology and Veterinary Science in the College of Agriculture, Health, and Natural Resources received a $432,990 contract from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) BARDA to develop this technology. In addition to the funding from BARDA, the researchers received $160,000 from the University of Connecticut to share the cost of the project.

Typically, vaccines against infectious diseases like COVID-19 require multiple painful, expensive and inconvenient injections, including a prime and several booster shots. This project will create a self-administered microneedle system which only requires a single-time administration into skin—similar to a nicotine patch—to perform a release profile of vaccines, simulating the effect of multiple injections.

The researchers hope that this single-use technology will keep patients away from visiting health care facilities multiple times during a pandemic. Instead, the microneedle patch can be easily applied at home.

The microneedle patch will contain the spike protein, or S-protein on the shell of the COVID-19 virus, and will be programmed to automatically deliver the S-protein as a vaccine antigen against COVID-19 into the skin in time-release fashion —similar to the use of multiple vaccine injections—to trigger the long-term immune protection against the virus.