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Injecting without needles has been a dream shared by scientists, medical staff, and more important: patients who fear them. With our solution, the dream becomes reality and can improve treatments by targeting specific depths in the skin and causing minimal damage. Moreover, it is possible to reduce the amount of waste generated per injection.
Our approach is to develop needle-free methods for liquid jet injection using microfluidic devices and thermocavitation, with relatively low laser energy and low cost of fabrication for an injection device.
Ambition
Every day an average of 44 million needles are being used. We have the ambition to bring to society a novel way to inject without needles.
Our value proposition is to revolutionize the experience of people who receive or perform frequent injections by introducing a needle-free device that offers high levels of safety and precision while being minimally invasive and eco-friendly.
Would you like to get involved or become a partner of BubbleGun?
Let’s inspire together.
research
Injecting without needles has been a dream shared by scientists, medical staff, and more important: patients who fear them. With our solution, the dream becomes reality and can improve treatments by targeting specific depths in the skin and causing minimal damage. Moreover, it is possible to reduce the amount of waste generated per injection.
Our interest is to develop needle-free methods for liquid jet injection using microfluidic devices and thermocavitation, with relatively low laser energy and low cost of fabrication for an injection device.
Therefore our multidisciplinary team is working on the following main phenomena:
Cavitation
Study of light-generated ultrafast bubble dynamics in microfluidic devices
Jetting
Rheologic investigations to achieve reproducible jetting with minimal jet break-up
Impact
Investigation of liquid jet injection into soft substrates with minimal splash-back
What is cavitation?
The formation and collapse of bubbles is also known as cavitation. There are several ways to do this, for example, with ultrasound, and lasers. Thermocavitation uses energy from a continuous wave laser to produce phase transitions of liquid into gas bubbles.
Impact of a microfluidic jets on substrates
Visualising complex phenomena
One example of our expertise in imaging the impact of jets with fast cameras became cover of the Soft Matter volume 17 of 2021. We compared the famous work of Doc Edgerton ‘making apple sauce’ with our jets impacting pendant droplets. Tiny Giants Studio supported with the beautiful artwork.
The paper is entitled ‘Impact of a microfluidic jet on a pendant droplet’. For a shorter version visit the news item of MIT.
Beyond the bullet
High-speed camera capture
To understand more complex situations, we studied what happens when a small water jet is shot at a water droplet suspended from a small tube. The properties of water are well known and can be altered with additives, to resemble soft matter, such as gelatine or skin. We then recorded each experiment with high-speed cameras.
Bullseye
Playing the videos back at 50,000 frames per second, we were able to measure the speed and size of the liquid jet that punctured, and sometimes pierced straight through the pendant droplet.
We strive to reduce production and usage costs of this technology, improving its reliability, and make it accessible for developing countries and millions of people worldwide. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 851630).
As awarded and recognized thought leaders in the pursuit of a future of injections without needles, pain, and fear we do not leave a single stone unturned. We welcome you to explore our restless research and publication database and see for yourself.