Needle and pill phobia sufferers must have cheered when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first transdermal patch in 1979. This new mode of drug delivery promised all the benefits of shots and pills but with no downside.
Patient comfort was not the reason biochemist Alejandro Zaffaroni (b. 1923) developed transdermal patches. Zaffaroni wanted to mimic the body's timed release of hormones and thought available drug delivery methods were not sophisticated enough. In 1969 he started his company, ALZA, and by 1971 had been awarded a U.S. patent for a "bandage for administering drugs." Big pharmaceutical companies thought the patch was the path to nowhere. "I thought the industry would look at what we were doing and say, 'Gee, it makes a good deal of sense. But they didn't,'" said Zaffaroni in an interview.
The pharmaceutical industry, however, soon realized that Zaffaroni's patches made good sense and would produce good business. By the early 1980s the first transdermal patch, delivering a motion sickness drug, went on sale. Patches for the heart medication nitroglycerin followed closely, and now we have patches for nicotine addiction, pain management, contraception, hormone replacement therapy, and many other applications.
Transdermal patches are a multibillion-dollar industry, worth $3 billion in the U.S. market alone. It all began at ALZA, Zaffaroni's start-up, which was sold in 2001 to pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson (of Band-Aid® fame) for $10 billion. Not bad for an idea that industry thought would go nowhere.
