Experimental investigation of the optimal driving pressure for a larger-volume controllable jet injection system

Jet injection technology has become the alternative drug delivery method of conventional needle-based injection due to its obvious advantages. In order to meet the demand for larger volume injection, the pneumatic jet injection systems have efficiently administrated vaccine up to 1 mL in human. Our recent study has also demonstrated that controlling the driving pressure enabled the pneumatic jet injection system to deliver larger volumes of drugs to target sites at desired rates and times. This work continues to explore the optimal two-phase driving pressure combination with better injection efficiency for typical larger-volume (1.0 mL) jet injection with controllable pneumatic jet injection system. Under the combination of a first phase driving pressure of 1.00 MPa and a second phase driving pressure ranging from 0.25 to 0.90 MPa, dynamic characteristics, dispersion characteristics and pharmacokinetic characteristics of this controllable jet injection system were quantitatively analyzed. In all experiments, it was confirmed that the optimal driving pressure combination of 1.0 mL ejection volume was close to (1.00-0.50) MPa. That is, the injection velocities of 151.85 m/s and 102.01 m/s for the first and second phase respectively facilitated better injection performance with a controlled release of 1.0 mL ejection volume. This strategy is practical for facilitating the clinical application of large-volume controllable jet injection systems.