How Shorter Needles With Thinner Walls Are Set To Improve The Injection Experience In Chronic Care

For decades, the most commonly used needle length for subcutaneous chronic drug delivery has been half an inch (12.7 mm).¹ As a result, most secondary injection devices have been developed around 12.7 mm staked needle prefillable syringes (PFSs) and the exposed needle length for manual injection has remained mainly focused around 12.7 mm.

However, there is a proportion of selfinjecting patients who do not apply² the recommended subcutaneous injection technique (45° with or without skin pinch, 90° with skin pinch),³ thereby increasing the risk profile of accidental intramuscular injection when using needles of this length. Therefore, the 12.7 mm needle length may not be optimal for subcutaneous drug delivery.

State-of-the-art innovation processes4 have evolved and are now more centred on end users’ needs (patients, healthcare workers and lay caregivers) rather than on developing new products around existing constraints.

Aurélie Pager, Clinical and Human Factors Program Leader; Brigitte Duinat, Senior Engineer; and Barbara Alves, Regulatory Affairs Specialist, all of BD Medical – Pharmaceutical Systems, reporting on several patient studies, look at how new BD Neopak™ XtraFlow™ prefillable glass-based syringes with shorter, 8 mm needles and thinner wall cannula technology are set to improve the injection experience for subcutaneous drug delivery in chronic care.