The delivery of particulate vaccines and drugs to human skin with a practical, hand-held shock tube-based system

A unique form of powdered vaccine and drug delivery has been developed. The principle behind the concept is to accelerate vaccine and drug particles, using a gas flow, so that they attain sufficient velocities to enter the skin and achieve a pharmaceutical effect. This paper presents the Contoured Shock Tube (CST); configured to deliver particles to the skin with a narrow and controlled velocity distribution and uniform spatial distribution. The gas and particle flows of a prototype CST are explored experimentally and compared with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) calculations. Some key steps in converting the prototype into a practical hand-held vaccine and drug delivery system are discussed. The ability of this system to deliver particles to the skin is illustrated by sample penetration data into excised human tissue.