HPPR hosts & contributors Shots - Health Blog Fri May 25, 2012
MIT Builds A Needle-Free Drug Injector The needle and syringe
are icons of modern medicine. But a device developed at MIT to
squirt medicines quickly and pretty much painlessly through the
skin suggests that the future of medicine could be needle-free.
The idea is to shoot an extremely thin, extremely fast jet of
medicine straight through skin and into muscle. "It's sort of
like a laser beam," project leader and mechanical engineering
professor Ian Hunter tells Shots. But because the jet is so thin
— he compares it to a mosquito's proboscis — it's unlikely to
produce much pain. Details of the prototype are published in the
journal Medical Engineering and Physics. Needles, as we all
know, can be quite painful, and it's estimated that at least 10
percent of the population has needle phobia. There's also the
risk of accidental jabs, which can spread disease. Jet
injections could avoid these problems. Jet injection technology
has been around for quite