Researchers Turn to Medtech to Reduce Pain and Swelling from Best-Selling Drugs

A Purdue University team created a biometric platform that uses an automatic injector to push a drug into the skin model and see how it interacts with the skin tissues. The technology has the potential to help drug manufacturers create new formulations and injection devices of medications. The researchers noted that eight of the top 10 selling drugs in the United States are biologics, which are produced from living organisms or certain components of living organisms. Subcutaneous injection is emerging as an effective delivery route alternative to intravenous infusion and allows patients to take the drug at home. The problem is, pain and discomfort has kept the practice from being broadly adopted, said the team from West Lafayette, IN-based Purdue University. “There is currently no reliable platform to quantify pain and discomfort induced by injections for optimizing drug formulations,” said Bumsoo Han, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue. “Patients are used to being told to measure their pain levels on a scale from one to 10. We hypothesize that the pain is related to tissue swelling during injection. Our platform enables prediction of mechanical stress and interstitial fluid pressure to optimize drug formulations with the goal of reducing pain and discomfort during subcutaneous injection.” Han and his team created a biometric platform that uses an automatic injector to push a drug into the sk...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: R & D Source Type: news