In 2021 a trial began in The Gambia. Infants received a measles and rubella vaccine. Some got it by injection. Some got it from a patch the size of a fingertip, pressed against the skin for a few seconds.
93% of the infants who got the patch developed measles immunity. 90% of those who got the needle did. For rubella, both groups reached 100%.
The patch is not a hypothetical. It works.
The vaccine used in that trial came from the Serum Institute of India, in Pune. India made the medicine. Someone else made the patch.
The problem is not the science
A microarray patch is a small square of dissolving material carrying hundreds of projections too fine to feel. Press it on. The tips dissolve into the skin. The drug goes in. No needle, and for many formulations no refrigerator.
Global health bodies rank these patches as the highest-priority innovation available for overcoming immunisation barriers in low- and middle-income countries.
The science has been settled for years. Manufacturing is the bottleneck.
Making these at scale is genuinely hard. Every projection has to form correctly, dose identically, dissolve predictably, and survive a year in a warehouse in Nagpur in May. Proving that to a regulator needs characterisation methods that barely exist yet.
Today every company working on this solves those same problems privately, at full cost, behind its own wall. None of them will publish. Each one pays for the whole climb alone.
Why India
India did something remarkable and almost nobody noticed.
Zero-dose children, meaning infants who receive no vaccine at all in their first year, fell from 909,000 in 2024 to 679,000 in 2025. For the first time since these estimates began in 2001, India is no longer among the ten countries with the most children unvaccinated against measles. 95% of Indian children now complete the three-dose DTP course and the second measles dose.
That was won by people. Health workers walking to settlements, ice packs, cold boxes, microplanning, and repeat visits to families who said no the first time.
What remains is the hardest and most expensive stretch of the journey. Migrant families. Urban slums. Villages at the end of a road that floods.
A patch changes the economics of that stretch. It travels without a cold chain. It can be given by someone with an afternoon of training. It leaves no sharps behind.
Globally, 13.5 million children received no vaccine at all in 2025. Nobody reaches them with more cold boxes.
What STRATUM is
A publicly funded, non-commercial foundry. It develops the manufacturing processes and the qualification methods for transdermal biologics, then publishes all of it.
Not a product company. Nobody's patch, and everybody's process.
Built in Goa, designed to transfer to Indian manufacturing at scale.
India already makes vaccines for the world. It should make the thing that delivers them.