A new Israeli invention takes the pain out of getting a shot. After eight years of technological development, a joint project by an Israeli and an American scientist has resulted in the invention of SonoPrep – which may render needles obsolete.
SonoPrep, which was designed by Professors Joseph Kost of Ben-Gurion University and Robert Langer of MIT, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and put on the market in the United States.
The device uses ultrasound to deliver medications painlessly through microscopic pores in the skin - holes created by low-frequency vibrations instead of by needles. The ultrasound waves are applied to the skin for 15 seconds, disrupting protective membranes to allow fluids to enter or exit the body and permitting larger molecules to enter the body. The skin returns to normal within 24 hours.
"The company expects to start selling the product this month, at first to topical local anesthetics and to physicians and hospitals," Kost told Israel21c. “There are competing technologies for needle-free drug delivery, such as those with electric fields, which require batteries,” said Kost. But he believes his device is faster, more widely applicable to local pain relief, and can be applied to the later systemic delivery of medications.
According to Kost, who is from BGU's department of medical engineering, the SonoPrep also offers future applications in the fields of drug delivery and diagnostics, for continuous and painless testing of blood sugar in diabetics, speedy administration of pain medications to cancer patients, and influenza vaccines to the general public.
"We are now able to focus on a whole series of new applications that replace needles with ultrasound technology. The technology also allows noninvasive checks of sugar levels for diabetics without needles," Kost added, "which is being developed together with [pharmaceuticals and health-care company] Bayer."
"In the current method of testing sugar levels, one can only get a discreet measurement. You have to prick some place to extract a droplet of blood, and you get one data point, but the diabetic won't know what to do with this information. His glucose level might be either dropping rapidly or rising rapidly, and he wouldn't know it unless he then extracts another droplet. Having a continuous sensing, you can display trends, and show on a screen with arrows going up or two arrows if it's going up rapidly," said Kost.
He also emphasized the benefits that will be available to the parents of child diabetics. "It will let them sleep better. You can put the sensor on the child, have a beeper in the parents' room, and the alarm will go off if the blood glucose veers from the norm," said Kost.
SonoPrep, which was designed by Professors Joseph Kost of Ben-Gurion University and Robert Langer of MIT, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and put on the market in the United States.
The device uses ultrasound to deliver medications painlessly through microscopic pores in the skin - holes created by low-frequency vibrations instead of by needles. The ultrasound waves are applied to the skin for 15 seconds, disrupting protective membranes to allow fluids to enter or exit the body and permitting larger molecules to enter the body. The skin returns to normal within 24 hours.
"The company expects to start selling the product this month, at first to topical local anesthetics and to physicians and hospitals," Kost told Israel21c. “There are competing technologies for needle-free drug delivery, such as those with electric fields, which require batteries,” said Kost. But he believes his device is faster, more widely applicable to local pain relief, and can be applied to the later systemic delivery of medications.
According to Kost, who is from BGU's department of medical engineering, the SonoPrep also offers future applications in the fields of drug delivery and diagnostics, for continuous and painless testing of blood sugar in diabetics, speedy administration of pain medications to cancer patients, and influenza vaccines to the general public.
"We are now able to focus on a whole series of new applications that replace needles with ultrasound technology. The technology also allows noninvasive checks of sugar levels for diabetics without needles," Kost added, "which is being developed together with [pharmaceuticals and health-care company] Bayer."
"In the current method of testing sugar levels, one can only get a discreet measurement. You have to prick some place to extract a droplet of blood, and you get one data point, but the diabetic won't know what to do with this information. His glucose level might be either dropping rapidly or rising rapidly, and he wouldn't know it unless he then extracts another droplet. Having a continuous sensing, you can display trends, and show on a screen with arrows going up or two arrows if it's going up rapidly," said Kost.
He also emphasized the benefits that will be available to the parents of child diabetics. "It will let them sleep better. You can put the sensor on the child, have a beeper in the parents' room, and the alarm will go off if the blood glucose veers from the norm," said Kost.