Who and when invented the transdermal patch, a new method of taking medication?
Those who fear injections and pills must have been overjoyed after the United States Food and Drug Administration approved the first skin patch in 1979. This new treatment method, called skin patch, can replace pills and injections, but does not involve the risk of needle pain or the pill being stuck in the throat.
In fact, the comfort of his patients was among the reasons why Alejandro Zaffaroni, a biochemist born in 1923, invented the transdermal patch. Zaffaroni wanted to imitate the human body's ability to release hormones over a period of time, but he felt that the treatment methods available on the market were not suitable for this. Zaffaroni founded his company, which he called ALZA, in 1969, and in 1971 he patented "a bandage used to administer drugs." Big pharmaceutical companies thought this bandage was useless. In an interview with Zaffaroni, he explained, "I thought the pharmaceutical industry would look at what we do and think it makes a lot of sense, but that didn't happen."
Alejandro Zaffaroni (February 27, 1923 – March 1, 2014) was a serial entrepreneur who was responsible for founding several biotechnology companies in Silicon Valley. Products that he was involved in developing include the birth control pill, the nicotine patch, corticosteroids, and the DNA microarray. In 1968, he founded ALZA, a syllabic abbreviation of his name, to develop medical treatments through controlled drug delivery.
However, the pharmaceutical industry soon realized that Zaffaroni's patch made sense and could be a good source of income for them. In the early 1980s, a skin patch was introduced, which can be used by people suffering from motion sickness. A patch was introduced that delivered nitroglycerin, a heart medicine, to the patient through a skin patch, shortly afterward. Today, skin patches are used in nicotine addiction, pain relief, birth control, hormone therapy and many other areas.
Today, the skin patch industry is known to be worth billions of dollars. The size of the skin patch market in the United States alone is more than $3 billion. This market was created thanks to Zaffaroni's company ALZA, which was sold to pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson for $10 billion in 2001. The company currently markets this product under the Band-Aid brand.