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We've been trying to replace hypodermic needles with jet injectors since the 60s, with variable success. Even though they were developed in an effort to replace needles and curtail disease manual between patients, the jet injector is vulnerable to becoming a illness vector, just similar anything else that breaks the pare. Only in a new and very literal application of the phrase "magic bullet," nanoengineers and analytical chemists from the University of San Diego have built an "acoustic microcannon" — an ultrasound-powered, needle-gratis drug delivery method that's meant to go medication straight to deep tissue, where nosotros need information technology to practice its piece of work.

Currently the WHO doesn't recommend the use of jet injectors, considering of their gamble of disease transmission betwixt patients. The hepatitis B virus, for example, is pocket-sized enough that it can be transmitted by cross-contamination on the imperceptible order of nanoliters, and jet injectors were identified every bit the vector of a 57-patient hep B outbreak associated with a weight-loss dispensary. Jet injectors can too inoculate the patient with ecology pathogens and skin flora during the vaccination. A podiatry clinic using jet injectors to apply lidocaine as well inoculated a bunch of its patients with the charmingly namedMycobacterium chelonae sp. abscessus. The bacteria had been growing in the distilled h2o used to make the manufacturer-recommended solution used to shop the musical instrument.

"Oh, don't whine, you still get a sticker afterwards."

"Oh, don't whine, you still get a sticker subsequently."

Plain nosotros need a meliorate solution. Durable goods tin be price-effective only make great illness vectors, and disposables like syringes and needles can be a trouble in the poorest places, where in that location'southward desperate need of vaccines for diseases like polio.  That's where the UCSD scientists come in.

The microcannon starts with a membranous polymer film. Similar poking a finger through plastic wrap, nanoengineers poked carefully sized holes in an rubberband membrane, and spray-coated the membrane with layers of graphene and aureate to make the cannon barrels rigid on the nanoscale. And so they backed the membrane with a gel matrix containing a perfluorocarbon (PFC) propellant and fluorescent "nanobullets" most a micron broad, and hit it with ultrasound. PFC vaporizes when hit with an ultrasound pulse, producing rapidly expanding gas bubbles that "fire" the nanobullets out of the microcannons at speeds on the gild of meters per second — and the fluorescent microbullets light up to show exactly where they landed in the tissue target.

cannonmicro

The authors of the study note that "This audio-visual-microcannon arroyo could be translated into advanced microscale ballistic tools, capable of efficient loading and firing of multiple cargoes, and offer improved accessibility to target locations and enhanced tissue penetration properties." Ultrasound is a little nimbler than gas tanks, in terms of the propellant for such a drug-delivery approach. And such a directly targeted administration of medication to tissue could exist much more efficient than digestion, which forces drugs through the hepatic portal — part of the body's sophisticated filter system.

An ultrasound device can even be handheld, as with a hypospray, although sadly that specific form gene already has a design patent — awarded to none other than Rick Sternbach, the "prop guy" from ST:TNG and Voyager.  No word still on whether nosotros'll be able to deliver vaccines by the time nosotros need them to stave off the Melvaran mud flea contamination.