No more needles? Startups are testing patches to deliver weight-loss drugs and other medications. - The Boston Globe (2025)

The first patch that could effectively deliver these kinds of drugs “would open the floodgates to a broader move away from the antiquated needle and syringe,” says Michael Schrader, a founder of several startups, including Cambridge-based Vaxess Technologies, which is working on drug-delivery patches.

Several approaches in the industry have been tried without success, Schrader says. The latest, which Vaxess and several other companies are pursuing, use “microneedles” spread across a sticker to get into the skin with a little sensation of roughness — but no single poke. The microneedles are often made of polymers that have the drug integrated into them, so the medication simply dissolves once it reaches the fluid beneath the skin, rather than being funneled through a metallic needle, as with a typical hypodermic shot.

One Boston startup working on patches, Anodyne Nanotech, is focusing initially on the GLP-1 weight loss drugs. Cofounder and chief business officer Konstantinos Tzortzakis confesses that he is “super needle-phobic, and I cannot swallow pills. When I need to have a blood test, I get nervous.” (As of last month, he had not yet had a flu shot for this season.)

Anodyne — which means “without pain” in Greek and Latin — was founded in 2019, with a license to use microneedle design and manufacturing processes originally developed at Tufts University. Tzortzakis says that the microneedles on the patch that Anodyne is developing are less than one millimeter in length, “small enough that they don’t touch any nerve endings.” The big challenges, he says, are ensuring that a patch can deliver a large enough dose to be useful for a drug like Wegovy or Ozempic and that the patch can deliver the same dose reliably — rather than delivering a larger dose one week and a smaller dose the next.

Schrader says that latter issue was a key factor in the 2022 failure in clinical trials of another patch system, from Boston-based Radius Health. Radius had hoped to win Food and Drug Administration approval for a patch that would deliver a drug to treat osteoporosis; the patch technology was originally developed inside Minnesota-based 3M Corp. Radius didn’t respond to several requests for comment, but the company doesn’t seem to be continuing to pursue patch-based delivery, according to its website and recent press releases. Another company, Zosano Pharma, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2022 after its patch to help manage migraines flunked clinical trials.

Vaxess originally was focused on using patches to deliver vaccines around the world more efficiently. That approach eliminates the need to keep them cold, or to have someone trained to administer the injections. But in December, Vaxess announced a collaboration with Novo Nordisk, the Danish company that makes Ozempic and Wegovy, to look at the efficacy of Vaxess’s patch — which relies on a small applicator device to affix it to the skin — for delivering those drugs.

Schrader left Vaxess in 2024 to start another company. Rachel Sha, a veteran of the French drugmaker Sanofi, took over as chief executive last May. She says that Vaxess, with offices in Cambridge and a manufacturing facility in Woburn, has been working over the past year to generate data from animal testing that shows the patch can be effective in delivering GLP-1 drugs. (The company has not yet reported that data, but Sha calls it “quite impressive.”)

Vaxess has 42 employees and has raised nearly $100 million in venture capital funding and grants. Sha says that although the company has conducted early clinical trials for a seasonal flu vaccine that could be delivered with its patch, the company has shifted its focus away from a flu vaccine. She doesn’t expect clinical trials for delivering a therapeutic drug, like a GLP-1 agonist, to begin until 2026.

A third local company, Lybra Bio, spun out from labs at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and MIT just last year. It envisions a patch to treat skin conditions like psoriasis and alopecia areata, which causes hair loss. Some drugs for those conditions, cofounder Núria Puigmal Domínguez says, are applied topically, and “don’t get to the deeper layers of the skin.” Others require injections designed to suppress the immune system, and they can impact the entire body, she says.

Lybra envisions a patch that could deliver drugs to precisely where they’re needed on the skin — like the scalp, in the case of alopecia. Domínguez says the company has raised some early funding from individual investors and hopes to begin testing in humans by 2027.

Anodyne has raised $9.5 million in funding so far and is currently trying to raise more, Tzortzakis says. So it’s still early days for these companies.

Venture capitalist Bruce Booth of Atlas Venture, who is not an investor in any of the three local startups, says that needle-free delivery of medication and vaccines “is certainly a nut many are trying to crack.” Other competitors include Micron Biomedical, an Atlanta company that pulled in $16 million in funding last month, and an Australian company called Vaxxas. (Vaxxas has an outpost in Cambridge, located about three miles from Vaxess.)

If the next few years see patches for these kinds of vaccines and medications win approval, there will be several benefits. Drugmakers will get to extend the patent duration of a drug they’ve already developed — adding up to 20 years of patent coverage by combining it with a patch, creating a new type of “combination” product, according to DeAnn Smith of the law firm Foley Hoag. It’ll be cheaper and easier to get drugs to patients, Schrader explains, since refrigeration won’t be required. (He envisions a seasonal flu vaccine that could be sent to individuals in the mail once a year.)

And trypanophobes — people who fear needles — would find life a little less stressful.

Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. Follow him @ScottKirsner.