Changzhou Holinx Industries Co., Ltd.

From Inception to Obsolescence: The Evolution of the Syringe

The syringe is an indispensable auxiliary device in modern medicine, allowing drugs to reach the affected area more quickly and effectively. Its contribution to disease treatment is undeniable. The history of the syringe may be much longer than you might imagine.

As early as the Han Dynasty, the famous medical scientist Zhang Zhongjing recorded in his medical classic "Treatise on Febrile Diseases" the use of "enema" to treat febrile diseases and promote bowel movements. The small bamboo tube used to hold pig bile was regarded as the earliest prototype of the syringe. Later, an Egyptian surgeon invented a syringe for enemas. Early enema tools used animal bladders as balloons, connected to tubes to inject common enema liquids under pressure. Subsequent enema syringes were mostly made of copper or glass. Early syringes were not equipped with needles and could only push the medicine into the body's natural orifices rather than penetrating the skin.

With the continuous development of pharmaceutical technology, people attempted to find other methods to deliver drugs directly into the body, such as using wood hooks dipped in medicine or surgical knives to pierce the skin, but these methods were unsatisfactory and carried the risk of wound infection. The first record of a piston syringe dates back to the 1st century AD in Roman times, when Celsus mentioned using a syringe to treat medical complications in his medical writings.

The Evolution of the Needle

In 1656, British architect Christopher Wren created an intravenous syringe using a quill and an animal bladder. Wren needed to cut open the patient's vein, making the incision large enough to insert a quill-sized syringe, and used the animal bladder to inject the medicine into the patient. Wren's animal experiments confirmed the higher efficiency of injection therapy, pioneering intravenous infusion treatment. Unfortunately, this method was not widely used in clinical practice, and there was an urgent need for a more efficient and scientific drug delivery method.

In 1844, an Irish surgeon named Francis Rynd invented the hollow needle and successfully injected medication into a patient. Subsequently, French physician Charles Pravaz and Scottish physicist Alexander Wood collaborated to develop a medical hypodermic syringe based on the bee stinger model. The needle was fine enough to pierce the skin and blood vessels for intravenous or intramuscular injection. This innovative design became the prototype of the modern syringe. Initially, this hypodermic syringe was used to inject morphine into patients with neuralgia to relieve pain. At the time, the dosage of injected drugs compared to oral drugs was still being explored, and Wood's wife was injured due to an overdose during intravenous injection treatment for neuralgia. Wood learned from this incident and added a scale to the syringe to precisely control the dosage, further refining the syringe's details.

However, the repeated use of syringes without complete sterilization posed significant infection risks, and an increasing number of bloodborne diseases were linked to unsafe injections. In the 1940s, an English pharmaceutical company produced an all-glass syringe with replaceable barrels and plungers. The components could be disassembled, sterilized, and reassembled for reuse. Starting in the 1950s, heat-sterilizable plastic syringes, disposable plastic syringes, and disposable needle syringes emerged one after another.

From "Needle" to "Needle-Free"

In 1992, the world's first needle-free syringe for insulin injection was approved for market. In 2012, a needle-free syringe was launched, which was actually a high-speed, high-pressure jet injector. When powered on, the injector's interior generates a powerful thrust that propels the drug at near the speed of sound in air, penetrating the skin and entering the body.

Nano-microneedles are an "alternative" syringe, consisting of a nano-chip covered with micro-needles and a patch soaked with medication. When used, it is applied to the epidermis, and the drug can open the skin barrier, allowing large molecule drugs to directly enter the body without touching the dermal nerves or blood vessels, greatly reducing skin barrier damage and achieving painless and non-invasive delivery.

However, the high manufacturing cost of nano-microneedles has not yet led to widespread clinical use, currently being more commonly used in the cosmetic field. Perhaps one day, nano-microneedles will be widely used clinically, making injections no longer a "nightmare" for children and alleviating the concerns of diabetes patients about their bodies being riddled with injection marks from long-term injections.