I start with Ana Sofia Oliveira Nogueira, a PhD candidate working on needle-free injection with high-speed jets. She explains why needles are worth replacing. They create a lot of sharps waste, and a reused or mishandled needle can spread infection.
First, the needle
To feel the problem, I try the needle myself. A tattoo machine drives a needle up and down dozens of times a second. It is the professional pigmentation device the group uses for its tattoo research, made by LaBina24. First, it runs on my own skin, without ink. Then I tattoo a piece of synthetic skin with ink.
Next, I make a tattoo with no needle at all. I use a jet injector. It fires a fast stream of ink straight through the synthetic skin. There is no needle, so nothing contaminated or sharp to throw away. The same ink ends up under the skin, with far less damage.
From tattoos to vaccines
Finally, I meet David Fernández Rivas, a professor in the Mesoscale Chemical Systems group, who shows where this is heading. His team is shrinking the jet with microfluidics. A laser heats liquid in a small glass chip until a bubble forms and fires a micro-jet thinner than a human hair.
That jet moves around 50 metres per second and barely marks the skin. By repeating it, the team can place a drug from the top layer of skin down to about 400 micrometres. Tattoo ink was only the first test, and they now aim the same jets at insulin and vaccines.
So, can Kees tattoo?
And me? I tattooed synthetic skin without a single needle. The spin-off FlowBeams, which David co-founded, is chasing a world without needles, where one day even a vaccine could feel like nothing.
