PharmaJet®, a company dedicated to enhancing the performance and outcomes of injectables through innovative delivery systems, today announced that their Tropis® Intradermal (ID) Needle-free System will be utilized in an extensive house-to-house polio immunization campaign in Somalia. This initiative aims to significantly reduce the immunity gap against type-2 poliovirus. Conducted in two rounds, the campaign will target children aged 4-59 months, providing them with needle-free polio vaccines and novel oral polio vaccines with a goal of achieving 95% coverage.

In collaboration with the African Field Epidemiology Network (AFENET), WHO, UNICEF, BMGF, GAVI, and CDC, the campaign targets over 170,000 children across four districts in Banadir, Somalia. “The PharmaJet team is very pleased to collaborate with AFENET, WHO, UNICEF, BMGF, GAVI, and CDC on this important campaign. Having delivered over 10 million polio immunizations using needle-free in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Somalia, we are very committed to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative,” said Paul LaBarre, Vice President, Global Business Development, PharmaJet.

The ongoing variant poliovirus outbreak, the longest-running of its kind, has paralyzed 38 children in Somalia. In April, Somalia’s Minister of Health and Human Services, His Excellency Dr. Ali Haji Adam, alongside high-level representatives of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), met to review progress and scale up efforts to end the country’s seven-year variant poliovirus outbreak. Through the Somalia Emergency Action Plan (SEAP 3), the country will continue collaborating with humanitarian partners to reach about 1.5 million zero-dose children, primarily in the densely populated central and southern regions.

Building on positive results from a WHO-led pilot in Nigeria, the house-to-house campaign in Somalia aims to replicate the high coverage rates facilitated by Tropis. The field evaluation in Nigeria found that a majority of parents (94%) and health staff members (93%) preferred needle-free injections over traditional methods, with 87% of target group children receiving their immunizations during the campaign.

PharmaJet’s Tropis System was previously deployed for polio vaccinations in the Berbera Region of Somaliland, achieving high immunization coverage due to the preference for needle-free administration and the willingness of parents to bring their children. Previous campaigns in Pakistan using needle-free technology saw an 18.4% improvement in mean coverage, with 97.6% of vaccinators and 99.6% of caretakers expressing a preference for needle-free over traditional needle and syringe methods.

“In Somalia, we are eager to build on previous house-to-house campaign experience that demonstrates how needle-free enables vaccination teams to move quickly and achieve high coverage without the burden of sharps waste management and with reduced vaccine volume and cold chain logistics,” LaBarre added.