New technology may deliver vaccines without needles. Actually, there are needles but they are so small and short you can’t feel them.

But with if a vaccine could be delivered by simply applying a patch? That’s Mark Prausnitz’s goal: creating a nickel-sized bandage-like device covered with 100 microscopic needles that would puncture the skin, then dissolve to get the vaccine into the body.

Maybe that sounds scary — 100 needles instead of one. But Prausnitz says you can’t really feel the needles. “It wouldn’t be like sandpaper or scratching,” he says. “You would have a hard time feeling a difference between the needles being there or not being there.”