| Bubble-free filling can enhance the dosing accuracy and efficiency of a syringe; Shawn D Kinney, Andrea Wagner and Christian Phillips at HCM explain
Prefilled syringes have gone a long way towards improving dosing accuracy and decreasing waste relative to vials. With their ease of use and reduced overfill requirements, prefilled syringes significantly decrease the risk of dosing errors and provide the potential for an increase of up to 23 per cent in product dose yield compared with a vial (1).
Two recent studies suggest that the dosing advantages of a prefilled syringe can be enhanced even further by decreasing the size of the gas bubble inside. A gas bubble is not intrinsic to a syringe but is a byproduct of the filling process. These studies show that reducing or eliminating the bubble inside a prefilled syringe offers added assurance that the exact deliverable dose will be expelled regardless of needle orientation.
FILLING AND STOPPERING PREFILLED SYRINGES
Until recently, there were two methods for filling and stoppering syringes: online filling and online stopper (piston) placement, and online filling followed by offline vacuum stoppering. Then, a third method was introduced by filling equipment manufacturers that allows for online vacuum filling and online vacuum stoppering. This was initially designed to enhance the filling of viscous products and reduce handling of the filled syringe prior to vacuum stoppering. More recently still, a fourth method for filling prefilled syringes was developed which uses vacuum filling and online vacuum stoppering along with proprietary technology to entirely eliminate the bubble inside a syringe. Reducing or eliminating the bubble in a prefilled syringe can have a significant impact on dosing accuracy, quantity and ease. |
