[Editors] MIT: Novel needle could cut medical complications

[Elizabeth Thomson]

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Novel needle could cut medical complications
--Device borrows from oil industry to keep jabs on target
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For Immediate Release
THURSDAY, APR. 2, 2009

Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
E: thomson at mit.edu, T: 617-258-5402

Graphic Available

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Each year, hundreds of thousands of people suffer  
medical complications from hypodermic needles that penetrate too far  
under their skin. A new device developed by MIT engineers and  
colleagues aims to prevent this from happening by keeping needles on  
target.

The device, which is purely mechanical, is based on concepts borrowed  
from the oil industry. It involves a hollow S-shaped needle containing  
a filament that acts as a guide wire. When a physician pushes the  
device against a tissue, she is actually applying force only to the  
filament, not the needle itself, thanks to a special clutch.

When the filament, which moves through the tip of the needle,  
encounters resistance from a firm tissue, it begins to buckle within  
the S-shaped tube. Due to the combined buckling and interactions with  
the walls of the tube, the filament locks into place “and the needle  
and wire advance as a single unit,” said Jeffrey Karp, an affiliate  
faculty member of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and  
Technology (HST) and co-corresponding author of a recent paper on the  
work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The needle and wire proceed through the firm tissue. But once they  
reach the target cavity (for example, a blood vessel) there is no more  
resistance on the wire, and it quickly advances forward while the  
needle remains stationary. Because the needle is no longer moving, it  
cannot proceed past the cavity into the wrong tissue.

Karp believes that the device could reach clinics within three to five  
years pending further pre-clinical and clinical testing.

First author Erik K. Bassett, now at Massachusetts General Hospital  
(MGH), developed the device for his MIT master’s thesis. He did so  
under Alexander Slocum, the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of  
Mechanical Engineering, with guidance from Karp and Omid Farokhzad of  
HST, Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital  
(Karp is also affiliated with the latter two). Additional authors are  
also from HMS and MGH.

The work was funded by the Deshpande Center for Technological  
Innovation at MIT and the Center for Integration of Medicine and  
Innovative Technology (CIMIT).

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Written by Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
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