Drug delivery
Autoinjectors provide a level of convenience whereby hospital visits are not always needed.
Patient-centric design
Susan Neadle is president of Combination Products Consulting Services, but prior to starting the company, she established the cross-functional Combination Products Centre of Excellence at Janssen, after which she became senior director of global design quality at Johnson & Johnson. Throughout both roles, human-centric design and the move toward home care in injectable drug- delivery devices was a key part of shaping product creation strategies.
“Using injectables,” she says, “enables the process to deliver medicines to where they need to be in the body. There’s no doubt that people see the convenience of home administration, but the major benefit is their ability to see their healthcare capabilities.” One of the trends that came out of patient-centric design, and continues to grow today, is on-body systems. “We’re increasingly moving towards on-body systems,” she explains, which deliver drugs to treat the likes of diabetes, psoriatic arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. “Indeed, a lot of biologics now require higher-volume doses,” Neadle adds. “For this, many patients have to go to hospital, where pre-filled syringes are administered. Some autoinjectors are now enabling patients to get past the necessity to be in that hospital setting.” Much of the focus for on-body combination devices has been managing these long-term conditions, but Neadle says the trend has also stretched to treating certain cancers. “Biologic products are often used for cancer therapies, but, in order to drive longer stability, the approach has been that you authorise powder in a vial in a combination package with, perhaps, water, to reconstitute,” she says. “This naturally leads to human factor issues. More and more patients can have a vial in the cartridge, but can also have it in on-body systems so that they can carry this process out at home. This is a huge evolution that will make life easier for many people.”
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At present, the most commonly employed drug- delivery systems are parenteral injections and implants, which offer reproducible, sustained drug delivery at a target site. Parenteral injections are most frequently administered in two ways: intramuscular (IM) and subcutaneous (SC). SC is often the preferred route for administering a drug because of the greater area for target injection sites, the use of shorter needles and less inconvenience for the patient. Both types are experiencing major growth in the global pharma market. In fact, data and analytics company GlobalData forecasted that the global market for parenteral injections will grow from 52% in 2019 to 55% in 2026. In the United States, more than 40% of the medications approved by the FDA are injectable, with subcutaneous and intramuscular products comprising a major percentage of approvals.
“More and more patients can have a vial in the cartridge, but can also have it in on-body systems so that they can carry this process out at home.”
But as the need for self-management continues to increase, the demand for personalised treatments is now placing unsustainable demands on hospital finances, and it is becoming increasingly apparent that patient care will have to be moved from resource-intensive clinical settings and into patients’ homes. This move will inevitably mean patients will continue to become increasingly responsible for the delivery of their own drugs, and it introduces a new challenge for device designers to overcome – patient medication adherence. In a recent paper titled ‘Patient Centric Pharmaceutical Drug Product Design – The Impact on Medication Adherence’, the authors stated: “Medication adherence is a growing concern for
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