Drug Delivery

From particle behavior and fluidics to materials science and engineering, Battelle’s comprehensive ecosystem of expertise is unmatched. We recognize that the path to improving patients’ lives with drug delivery innovations is a challenging road full of technical, regulatory and commercial hurdles to overcome. As complexity increases, access to domain expertise across multiple scientific and technical disciplines is critical to characterizing the challenge and developing solutions that are commercially viable.

Challenge accepted. 

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For more than a quarter century, Battelle’s cross-functional development teams have helped commercial clients bring first-of-its-kind drug delivery technology to market. 

Highlights include:

• One of the first pen injectors on the market
• The first digital device commercially launched
• Design, engineering and launch support for the most successful subcutaneous platform in the history of drug delivery technology
• Full or partial involvement in the development, refinement and commercialization of more than 30 unique delivery systems across a range of modalities

New drug formulations demand new answers. While Battelle has experience across a wide variety of drug delivery modes, we are focusing on three main areas to bring our innovative solutions to these drug delivery challenges. 

Injectors
Injection is far and away the most common, and often the only, way that millions of patients can manage their chronic conditions with modern treatments. With new biologics continually coming on the market, Battelle is investing our diverse talent and expertise in developing practical, intuitive delivery solutions for the existing and emerging challenges that patients, and device customers, face.

One example of this is the Battelle-designed controllable-force autoinjector (CFAI) technology. (See image on the right.) This system eliminates key drawbacks of conventional autoinjector models and provides faster, better delivery of viscous drugs. Additionally, the system’s unique soft needle insertion mechanism allows us to reduce insertion impact force, decrease delivery times or double the viscosity of fluids delivered, and improve reliability and consistency near the end of the stroke. These features address recurrent patient/user challenges with existing technology to lower the mental burden of the daily injection routine. 

Patch Pumps
New biologics and better therapies are being introduced seemingly every day. These drugs are a lifeline for patients, but also are frustrating because dosing regimens may require a high volume to be injected slowly, over time. Typically, this is best accomplished in a clinical setting. But Battelle is exploring approaches and technologies to help bring high-volume delivery out of the clinic and allow patients the flexibility to administer for themselves, wherever is best for them.

For example, our ChemEngine technology drives injections at a tunable speed and is conformable. Deployed in a patch pump/on-body format, it could enable lower profile, smaller footprint devices for greater patient convenience and comfort as people receive their medications while going about their lives.

Inhalation Technology
Battelle’s design, development and testing of inhalation technologies gives us a head start to address the challenges of inhalation device development. Our broad experience – from user research and engineering to advanced materials and companion assays – drives us to develop better, safer, more effective device innovations, helping you engineer around patient constraints to deliver best-in-class inhalation delivery systems.

Take for example our work on an aerosol delivery system that could potentially transform the current standard for treating Respiratory Distress Syndrome (RDS) in neonates. The system enables deep lung delivery of a highly viscous synthetic surfactant, potentially reducing or eliminating the need to intubate premature babies at risk for RDS.

Turns about ADDI is not a person. It’s the Battelle Advanced Drug Delivery Initiative – our response to unmet market needs with the next generation of innovations in drug delivery.

The Battelle ADDI family of concepts is built on a powerful mix of innovative Battelle technologies paired with forward-leaning form factors. Honed over decades of success, our human centric design hallmark of applying human empathy with engineering rigor puts the patient’s medical needs, safety and lifestyle considerations at the center of all we do for you.  This means we create solutions that work – for industry and for the patients/users who they serve. 

Check out these examples:

ADDI Inject: Leverages Battelle’s controllable force intellectual property to drive injections using a standard spring in novel ways to improve the user experience, allows for delivery to complete within expectation regardless of viscosity and is packaged within a form factor that utilizes “best of breed” principles from over a decade of human factors evaluations for these platforms. 

ADDI Pump: Leverages Battelle’s ChemEngine intellectual property to drive subcutaneous infusion of larger volumes of medication, offers the promise of freeing users from the status quo by providing an option to free themselves from 30+ minute visits to infusion centers for their medication and capitalizes on the conformability of the ChemEngine solution related to the primary container for the drug and the drive mechanism to offer a user preferred footprint for on-body injection.

 

The ADDI program continues forward as new challenges emerge in the field of drug delivery to address the challenges of tomorrow related to next generation biologics, cellular and gene therapies, and new routes of administration for both existing and novel treatments. 

The team at Battelle looks forward to meeting these emerging challenges in the same way that we have solved for the unknown for the last 30 years. We seek to continue to honor the spirit of the Battelle mission, to advance technology for the betterment of humankind. We accept the challenge of pushing the boundaries of what is possible because at Battelle we believe it can be done.