Drugs are often delivered via needles requiring skilled medical staff, however, scientists are moving towards more innovative ways to deliver biologics and vaccines to the human body. One of them is air puff to deliver drugs through the skin with a little pressure.
A team from the University of Texas in Dallas has made this new injector. According to the team, it is a system that compresses gas and can be used to deliver vaccines in a relatively less painful way. Additionally, this new injector can also be used for a variety of applications from veterinary medicine to agriculture.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, principal investigator Jeremiah Gassensmith purchased inexpensive pieces of a compressed gas-powered jet injection system to experiment with. Upon returning to campus, he gave the pieces to Yalini Wijesundara, a graduate student in the lab who had previously researched compressed gas jet injectors dating back to the 1960s that use a narrow stream of fluid for injection. Wijesundara discovered that they could use this technology to deliver cargo encased in metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).
Jet injection systems inserted biological cargo into cells in the past, but had the risk of spreading infectious disease due to fluid splash back. The “gene gun” in veterinary medicine used microparticles and was expensive. To address these issues, Gassensmith’s team placed the cargo inside a metal-organic framework (MOF) called zeolitic-imidazolate framework eight (ZIF-8), which was in powdered form, eliminating the need for cold storage.
The team created the “MOF-Jet” based on the gene gun, which delivered ZIF-8 bullets containing the powdered vaccine. They tested the system by delivering a ZIF-8 encased gene to onion cells and a ZIF-8 encased protein to mice.
Gassensmith found that changing the injector’s carrier gas affected the delivery speed of the cargo to cells. Carbon dioxide resulted in a quick release, while regular air took several days. This discovery creates many possibilities for altering release time and expanding the system’s potential applications.
Furthermore, researchers suggest it could distribute cancer therapeutics more evenly into a melanoma than the current delivery method of a needle.