RandomTechNews

One of the commonest phobia of the public to the doctor's office is getting a shot because it's mostly painful. This phobia might soon become a lot less common if the Jet Injector developed by the MIT researchers finds way to your doctors office.

This device 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.

“If you are afraid of needles and have to frequently self-inject, compliance can be an issue,” says Catherine Hogan, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and a member of the research team. “We think this kind of technology … gets around some of the phobias that people may have about needles." 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 (almost the speed of sound in air) out through the ampoule’s nozzle  as wide as a mosquito’s proboscis. The speed of the coil and the velocity imparted to the drug can be controlled by the amount of current applied; the MIT team generated pressure profiles that modulate the current. The resulting waveforms generally consist of two distinct phases: an initial high-pressure phase in which the device ejects drug at a high-enough velocity to “breach” the skin and reach the desired depth, then a lower-pressure phase where drug is delivered in a slower stream that can easily be absorbed by the surrounding tissue.

Through testing, the group found that various skin types may require different waveforms to deliver adequate volumes of drugs to the desired depth.

“If I’m breaching a baby’s skin to deliver vaccine, I won’t need as much pressure as I would need to breach my skin,” Hogan says. “We can tailor the pressure profile to be able to do that, and that’s the beauty of this device.”

• Less Pain.
• Controlled exact dose injected.
• Controlled Depth.
• Another advantage of this method of drug delivery over the old hypodermic syringe is that it can reduce the potential risk of accidental needle-stick injuries. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 385,000 accidental needle-stick incidents occur each year among hospital-based health care workers in the U.S.

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