Development of Pyro-Drive Jet Injector With Controllable Jet Pressure

Abstract

Various jet injectors have been developed and used for the effective and efficient administration of drugs. Jet injections overcome the limitations of other drug delivery methods, such as ablation, iontophoresis, electroporation, sonophoresis, and microneedles, because jet injection is not limited by the diffusion rates of different drugs. However, controlling the jet pressure during drug delivery is difficult with most conventional jet injectors. Efficacy evaluation of such devices on laboratory animals is strongly required before initiating human clinical trials, but minimal research has been performed for the device developments. Therefore, we developed jet injector devices based on pyrotechnics using 2 types of explosives with different burning rates; we call these pyro-drive jet injectors. The liquid jet pressure profile suggests that the penetration depth and injection volume for soft materials and skin tissue are controllable. Here, we propose the pyro-drive jet injectors as another candidate well-controlled jet injector for laboratory animals in drug discovery testing as well as human clinical use.

Keywords: control; jet injector; needle-free; pyro-drive; pyrotechnics; transdermal.