PharmaJet: Vaccinating the World with Colorado-Built Medical Technology
The toddler’s mother had brought him in for a vaccination, and his face expressed the familiar fear that this was going to hurt. But rather than a syringe, the woman doing the honors held a plastic device designed in Golden, Colorado. With a click, the spring-powered PharmaJet Tropis ID pumped a tiny stream of fluid into the lower layers of the child’s skin. It took less than one-tenth of one second.
The look on his face was: “That’s it?”
The boy was one of seven million people in Pakistan who received needle-free polio vaccines via PharmaJet’s system prior to 2023. “And polio is just the start”, says Chris Cappello, the company’s CEO.
Cappello cites Colorado’s ability to attract talent as a key factor in PharmaJet’s success here. He’s an example of that. The Golden native had moved to California after earning his mechanical engineering degree at Colorado State University. A couple of years later, he was looking for a mission-driven company with a medical device that could have a global impact.
“Right in my backyard, there was [a company] that checked all the boxes,” Cappello says.
