Performance and design improvements toward the commercialization of a needle-free jet injector/

Abstract

In the past years, the BioInstrumentation Lab has developed a handheld needle-free jet injector based on a custom Lorentz-force motor. While the current handheld design is effective as a research tool, many improvements are needed before it can be a commercially viable product for individual human use. Improvements in various aspects of the design have been implemented. A Hall effect sensor and a thermopile were added to provide critical safety and quality monitoring of the Lorentz-force motor, and a linear encoder provided increased position resolution. Flexible coil elements reduced drag on the coil while eliminating a mechanical failure mode caused by moving cables. A low cost optical encoder system has been implemented to provide 5 pm position resolution for the actuator and this has improved error of volume ejections to 0.3 pL. All these improvements have also been proved to be scalable by their implementation on a scaled down design of the current actuator. This actuator was modeled and verified to have approximately half the force output of the current actuator, and is small and light enough to be packaged in a portable device. Lastly, an adaptor that allows extraction of drug out of a vial using the BioInstrumentation Lab's needle-free injector has been developed as well as an automatic detection scheme that expels any air drawn in by this extraction process with minimal fluid loss.