Tiny Tech 43: Say Goodbye to Needles

Today from the world of Tiny Tech:

Have you ever wished you could get needed medical injections without being poked with a needle? Well, instead of using needles, hand-held devices called jet injectors use high-pressure puffs of gases or liquids to deliver medicines just under the skin. They don’t work, however, for medicines that must be deposited in muscle tissue. For those, hypodermics are still best.

One challenge with jet injectors is to control how fast the medicine is released into the body. To do this, scientists are looking at placing the active ingredient inside the nano-sized holes of a molecular scaffold called a metal-organic framework or “MOF”. Using ordinary air in the jet, and the right kind of scaffold, the injected MOF dissolves slowly and the medicine is released over a week or so. In contrast, if the jet is made of carbon dioxide (the fizzy gas in soft drinks), the tissue at the jet injection site becomes mildly acidic. This causes the MOF to dissolve and release the medicine in a few hours.

Yes, many things in life are annoying, but injections are good things, particularly if you let them … “jet” under your skin.

Tiny Tech is made possible by the National Science Foundation and WUFT. To learn more about Tiny Tech, go to tinytechradio.org.

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