CHANNELS

Aerospace

Automotive

Automated & Autonomous Vehicles

Battery & Electrification Technology

Defense

Drone TV

Electronics

Manufacturing & Prototyping

Materials

Medical

Motion Control

RF & Microwave Technology

Robotics & Automation

Sensors & IoT

Test & Measurement

Aerospace
Automotive
Automated & Autonomous Vehicles
Battery & Electrification Technology
Defense
Drone TV
Electronics
Manufacturing & Prototyping
Materials
Medical
Motion Control
RF & Microwave Technology
Robotics & Automation
Sensors & IoT
Test & Measurement
Aerospace & Defense
Search Results

No More Needles: New Device Can Inject Variety of Drugs

MIT researchers have engineered a device that delivers a tiny, high-pressure jet of medicine through the skin without the use of a hypodermic needle. The device can be programmed to deliver a range of doses to various depths – an improvement over similar jet-injection systems that are now commercially available. The design is built around a mechanism called a Lorentz-force actuator – a small, powerful magnet surrounded by a coil of wire that's attached to a piston inside a drug ampoule. When current is applied, it interacts with the magnetic field to produce a force that pushes the piston forward, ejecting the drug at very high pressure and velocity out through the ampoule's nozzle – an opening as wide as a mosquito's proboscis. Jet-injected drugs could improve patient compliance and reduce accidental needle sticks.

Topics:
Drug Delivery Mechanical Components Medical Motion Control Power Transmission

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:05 Hello. I'm Professor Ian Hunter, and I run the Bioinstrumentation Lab here in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. I'm joined by my colleague, Dr. Cathy Hogan, and together, including the help from a number of very, very talented students and post-docs and others in the lab, we've created a very interesting new technology for drug delivery. What you're watching is a simulation of drug delivery into the skin, in this case of a particulate,

    00:00:37 but not using a needle. We're developing a system that eliminates the use of needles, and instead delivers drugs into tissue using a high-pressure stream right into the skin. In our lab, we've developed a prototype of a device that uses a highly controllable jet injector, and a computer interface that controls volume of drug delivered, and the velocity at which it moves. It can both inject into and aspirate from tissue. And we're able to fire the drug out at almost

    00:01:05 the speed of sound, if we need to. The speed of sound in air is about 340 meters per second. It's capable of pressurizing the drug up to as much as 100 megapascals, and we can do that in under a millisecond. So here you can see the heart of the Lorentz-force actuator, the heart of our actual technology: there's a magnet in the center of the jet injector that's surrounded by a coil of wire, and when we apply a current to the coil, we create a Lorentz force, that pushes this piston, which forces the drug

    00:01:40 out of the ampoule. This gives us a tremendous amount of control, depending on how much current we put in, so that, as you can see here, we can successfully deliver a wide variety of volumes of drug, at a wide variety of velocities, with a very low degree of error, something a needle can't do. We can also change the velocity over the course of a single injection, so it breaches the skin at one velocity, and then disperses the drug at another. We accelerate the coil to the desired speed,

    00:02:08 hold it there for a defined time, and then decelerate to a lower velocity to disperse and absorb the drug into the tissue. So the drug comes out at this fine jet, about the same diameter as a mosquito proboscis, and, as many of you know, you don't feel when the mosquito inserts its proboscis into your skin, because it's so very narrow -- our jet is of a similar diameter. We've also developed this device so that it can be used for delivery of drugs right through the eye

    00:02:45 and into the retina. We've succeeded in delivering drugs through the tympanic membrane in your ear, so we can deliver drugs to the middle and inner ear, and we've also done something that we think is pretty cool: we can take a drug in powdered form, put it in this device; the device, because of its very, very fast response, is able to vibrate that powder so it behaves like a liquid, and then we inject it into tissue, as though it was a liquid,

    00:03:18 even though it's a powder.