Lasers Could Soon Replace Painful Injections

No one really relishes the idea of getting an injection. According to the statistics, it is said that roughly 10-20% of American adults suffer from trypanophobia, the extreme fear of hypodermic needles and injections, and this can create a problem because it means that it might be difficult for them to get tested for certain illnesses or to receive medication.

However, in the future it seems that maybe injections done via needles could no longer be necessary, thanks to the work of researchers led by scientists from the Wyss Institute, where they have refined laser-cavitation techniques that could help deliver medication into the bloodstream of patients without having to pierce the skin with a needle.

This technique isn’t new and has been inspired by nature, where mantis shrimp use similar techniques to deliver attacks to their prey. For those unfamiliar, cavitation involves the rapid change in a liquid’s pressure to create low-pressure bubbles of vapor. In the case of laser cavitation, it uses a pulse laser to collapse those vapor bubbles on a small scale, where it is capable of blasting vapor streams up to 850ft/s and five millimeters into the skin.

That being said, don’t expect to see this type of laser injections arrive anytime soon. The researchers are hoping that human trials will begin in the next two years. According to Alex Abramson, a postdoctoral fellow and chemical engineer at Stanford University, “We want to make sure that there isn’t any change to the pharmacokinetics or pharmacodynamics of the delivery. And we also want to make sure that there aren’t any proteins or enzymes present in the tissue that could be affecting the drug in any way.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: Medical
Tags: Health, Science