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Abstract
Needle-free jet injectors are minimally invasive drug delivery systems that utilise high-velocity microjets (∼100 m/s) created by pressurising the liquid drug through a micronozzle (50–300 µm in diameter). Most of the current commercially available jet injectors use a mechanical power possessed by a compressed spring or air to pressurise the fluid inside the injection chamber to deliver the liquid drug (typically ∼100 µL in volume) into the skin matrix. However, they cannot be utilised for achieving shallow penetration depths as they lack dynamic control that can shape the real-time microjet characteristics. Recently, electrically or optically powered jet injection systems are being developed to achieve shallow penetration depth by small-volume (<5 μL) injections. However, they require complex system and have a limited injection frequency (maximum reported value is 16 Hz). Herein, we propose a novel electro-mechanical jet injection system, where a mechanically actuated source pressurises the fluid inside the injection chamber and an electrically actuated system controls the characteristics of the propelled microjet. A computational model was developed to prove the feasibility of the proposed system, and the obtained results showed that the proposed system could produce stable small-volume microjets at about 100 Hz frequency that could be utilised for drug delivery applications.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability
Data underlying the results presented in this paper are not publicly available at this time but may be obtained from the authors upon reasonable request.