Business
Immunization is an important subject to talk about, especially in the midst of a pandemic like COVID-19. While traditional immunization methods are popular as ever, more and more companies are seeking out methods for needle-free immunization that mitigate some of the risks presented by needle immunization. Bob Roark is joined by PharmaJet (https://pharmajet.com/) , to discuss the pressing impetus for investing more resources into needle-free immunization. Let Bob and Heather take you through this vital topic with a spirited conversation. --- Watch the episode here:[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYQTMdkD5qI[/embed] Listen to the podcast here:[smart_track_player url="" title="The Pressing Need For Needle-Free Immunization With Heather Callender-Potters" image="http://businessleaderspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/BLP-SquareLogo-WhiteBlueBG1400x1400.png" background="default"] The Pressing Need For Needle-Free Immunization With Heather Callender-PottersMy guest is Heather Potters. She's the Vice Chairman, Global Business Development Officer, and Cofounder of (https://pharmajet.com/) . Welcome, Heather. It's exciting for me. Thank you. I'm so excited to have this time with you and get your story out there, which it's already out there, but at least through this channel. If you could talk about PharmaJet's vision and your vision is needle-free applications for immunization and the story of why you started there and why that's still your focus. My mother and me cofounded the business. We wanted to make sure that we made a contribution to healthcare. She had experienced needles, she'd seen reused and there was a call to action by the World Health Organization because they were witnessing needle reuse about whether or not somebody could develop a needle-free immunization tool. We decided to rise to that occasion. When we looked at the market, immunization is global. We all share the healthcare burden. We're in the midst of something around Coronavirus where it's abundantly clear that if people are healthy, they're at work, the economy works. If a group of people is healthy, then the population generally is healthy. We focused on what we could do around taking needles out of the garbage dumps and the risk of reuse and needlestick and then that immunization market that's growing in perpetuity. More people being born, more need for immunization. If you fast forward to where we are, the exciting thing is that over time we've been able to prove that you might be able to move from the muscle to the skin and functionally reduce the dose of the vaccine by 80% and get the same immune response. It’s nifty. It's around the immunology that our skin has. Our body's barriers are always protecting us from things. The other exciting thing is that we kept seeing this glimmer of making vaccines work better. In particular in nucleic acid vaccines, messenger RNA, and DNA vaccines, we tend to see a multiple of higher immune response versus needle-based delivery. There's a whole slew of things, whether or not it's infectious disease or oncology, things coming to market to address disease concerns that we don't have treatment for. Like on the infectious disease side, it could be Zika and now also COVID. On the oncology side, it could be someone who's manifested HPV, cervical cancer, lung cancer, or leukemia. Lots of things that give us joy around near-term immunization, medium-term, reduce the dose in the longer-term of bringing things to market that don't have vaccine cures. [caption id="attachment_5238" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Needle-Free Immunization: A significant percentage of people avoid immunization because they don't like needles.[/caption] Thinking about the mechanics, my memory goes back to when I was a little boy. I got my polio sugar cube with a little red dot on it. We have certainly progressed a long way since then. For you with the jet...