I Don't Mind the Pain

Tattoo Method Shows Promise as Vaccine Delivery System

Exciting studies now suggest that injecting DNA-containing vaccines with a tattoo gun (lacking the ink that normally creates the tattoo) is far more effective than the way human vaccines are now delivered.
A German study published this month in Genetic Vaccines and Therapy showed that administering pieces of DNA from the human papillomavirus virus into the skin of mice by three tattoo-gun injections produced a 200-fold greater production of antibodies to the virus than was achieved with the old method of a needle injection into a muscle.
The reason that tattoo injections are so much more effective is thought to be because the repeated puncturing of the skin by the rotating tattoo needle does real damage to the skin — the presence of a bona fide wound causes inflammatory cells to flood into the site, where they speed and enhance the immune response to the vaccine.
This skin damage, however, is also painful, and this fact may limit the application of the tattoo-injection technique for routine vaccinations. But the new technique shows promise for the use of DNA injections to treat, rather than prevent, diseases like cancer or possibly even HIV infection, where potential benefits would outweigh the pain of the injections.
The use of tattoo injections, coupled with the ability to rapidly produce large quantities of a vaccine, might prove extraordinarily valuable in a situation such as a threatened terrorist attack, where a sudden need arises for large amounts of an effective vaccine.