New inhaler triggered by inhalation
UK technology design and development company Cambridge Consultants (CCL) has revealed a radical new design for the next generation of Metered Dose Inhalers (MDIs). The design includes a breath-actuation mechanism and dose counter, improves dose content uniformity, involves no drug wastage, and can be manufactured for just half the cost of current breath-actuated MDIs, CCL says. Currently, some 600m MDI units are sold worldwide each year, the most common use of which is for treating asthma.
The new CCL design is said to overcome three of the largest drawbacks with current inhalers. Most MDIs require the patient to activate the device and to breathe in simultaneously. Research shows that three in every four patients, and particularly the young and the old, fail to do this effectively. The new design incorporates a breath-actuation function to overcome this problem. Furthermore, the CCL design incorporates just six parts in total, making it significantly cheaper to manufacture than its breath-actuated competitors, which require at least 10 individual components to be assembled in manufacturing.
As conventional MDIs reach the end of their life, the delivery of active drug tails off rapidly, with the typical patient 'float' or 'shake' test proving ineffective as a way of measuring active content. To overcome this, CCL's design incorporates a dose counter, showing how many doses are left. This reduces the chance of the device being used with too little of the active drug remaining, and provides accurate information to help with re-ordering new devices.
Due to the problem of drug migration, typical MDI users are instructed to waste the first dose each time they activate the device. But CCL's design claims to deliver high dose content uniformity and increase the treatments per device by 50%. This makes the device highly cost effective when comparing drug delivered on a 'price per dose' basis.
Jon Tuckwell, a drug delivery expert at CCL commented: 'Our design responds to a real market need in the face of both growing patient numbers and tougher regulation. While many in the industry have tried to solve the most common problems through the use of complex engineering, we have taken the route of proposing a simple yet elegant solution. Our design offers significant cost savings with increased functionality and enhanced drug delivery capability.'