Small children and trypanophobes (those with an extreme fear of medical injections or hypodermic needles) everywhere may soon have a reason to no longer dread getting injections.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a needleless method to inject medicine using a high-pressure jet through skin, reports the Daily Mail.
Likened to a needleless device lead medical officer Leonard 'Bones' McCoy used aboard the Star Trek Enterprise, it could put an end to painful injections.
Led by Professor Ian Hunter, the device is able to both inject into, and aspirate from tissue.
At the heart of the device is a magnet surrounded by a coil of wire, and when a current is applied to the coil it creates what is called a Lorentz-force. This force pushes a piston forward thereby injecting the drug. The feeling left is similiar to that of a mosquito bite.
Capable of injecting at almost the speed of sound if needed, the device can also adjust for a range of doses at various pressures to breach various types of skin.
Reasearcher Catherine Hogan told the Daily Mail that “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. We can tailor the pressure profile to be able to do that, and that's the beauty of this device.”
Other types of hypodermic needles have been developed over the years like nicotine patches that slowly release a drug through the skin, but none have had this level of control.
The device is also able to deliver drugs through the eye into the retina as well as through the tympanic membrane in a person’s ear, reaching the middle and inner ear, according to Dr. Hunter.
Aside from ending painful injections, researchers have predicted a number of other benefits, such as improving compliance among patients afraid of needles.
The number of accidents among doctors and nurses who accidentally prick themselves with needles could also be drastically reduced. For people living with diseases such as diabetes, that require frequent injections, this new delivery system could be a life changer.
If all of this doesn’t sound innovative enough, Dr. Hunter explains, “We’ve also done something that we think if 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 that it behaves like a liquid and then we inject it into tissue as though it was a liquid even though it’s a powder.”
It seems Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy is more “a MIT scientist, not a doctor.”
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