Biomedical Device Laboratory

Goal : A needle-free injector is a device capable of delivering drugs into the body by puncturing the skin with high-velocity microjets. Even though a functional product was released in the 1940s, the precise mechanism of the process remains unknown. Several engineering and clinical studies have been done to understand this mechanism. The interaction of a gigh-velocity fluid microjet and the skin tissure poses a problem unlike those of other methods for drug delivery. In the needle-based approaches the required volume of drug is directly introduced into a specifici target refion of the skin tissue. However, in needle-free jet injection systems, the injected microjet has to pass through the skin tissue layers and their interfaces, both having different mechanical properties. Our research objectives are to identify the key parameters in the process, study the penetration and dispersion characteristics in skin tissue layers and thereby aid in optimizing the design of needle-free injection systems.

Impact : Needle-free jet injectors are proven tool for mass immunization/vaccination campaigns in the past. Organizations like World Health Organization (WHO) have been using it for their mass immunization campaigns. At present, the world is recovering from COVID-19 pandemic and mass immunization may be the next step to eradicate this pandemic. Needle-free injectors could have a significant role in this process. It has numerous advantages over the conventional systems including the acceptability than a needle injection. Apart from vaccination campaigns they are currently used in many applications including insulin injections, gene therapy, hormone injections, anesthesia, cosmetic injections, etc.

Methodology : We are using experimental and computational techniques to understand the various factors that could affect the injection characteristics of a needle-free injection systems. Experimental studies include high speed visualization of the needle-free injections in in vitro and ex vivo mediums to study how the propelled microjet interacts with the injected medium. Computational studies in clude the use of commercially available finite volume code like ANSYS FLUENT to study the propulsion characteristics of the high velocity microjet.