Originally published at: Incredible high-speed images of a water jet shooting through a droplet could lead to better needle-free drug injections | Boing Boing
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That does not look like minimal damage…
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Wonder if it would apply to tattooing?
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I thought they developed “needle-less” injections years ago. They were used mostly in the military. Did I dream that?
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Needle-free drug injection exists, but only for intramuscular drugs, and AFAIK it isn’t approved for human use. It’s how we inject all our livestock though. If you’ve ever seen those multi-shot drug guns used by ranchers in a cattle chute, that’s what you’re looking at.
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This technology is already old, as anyone who has been in the military (at least back in the 80s-90s) knows. And they sucked – it may work ok for small doses of a drug, but it is, essentially, a water jet cutter as noted in the article. Any movement by either the patient or the vaccinator results in a nasty cut, would always result in a pressure bruise and bleeding, and the general opinion (given by a number of ex-Army and Navy types when the topic came up) was that they would very much prefer a needle. If they can resolve these issues, which the article indicates is the plan, then they may end up with something that can be used for mass inoculations without having to use up a fresh needle each time – but I suspect that it is inherently impossible to remove the pain and injury caused by shooting someone with a bullet of medicine fast enough to have it end up somewhere useful.
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AFAIK this technology was introduced in the 60’s for mass public vaccination programs. The military was a big user of it (I got it in '85). Even the military stopped using it in the late 90’s due to risk of infection.
What about the microneedle approach? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microneedle_drug_delivery
It seems likely to cause less pain and tissue damage.
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