The word injection triggers anxiety in many people because of the pain associated with needles and many patients stop adhering to their treatments involving injections. Now, MIT spinout Portal Instruments has brought out a smart, needle-free injection device that could reduce the pain associated with needle injections, shorten administration time, and improve patient adherence.

The jet-injection device was developed by the startup after years of MIT research. The device renders a rapid, high-pressure stream of medicine, as thin as a strand of hair, through the skin in adjustable dosages, causing little to no pain.

That’s not all, a connected app tracks each dose and the medicine’s effects, and uploads that information to the cloud, for patients and doctors. The device is a drug-device combination product and will be sold to medical professionals to be sold to patients with a prescription.

The device called PRIME is about the size of an electric razor. Drugs are loaded into a single-use, disposable vessel, which has a tiny nozzle at its tip. Once the vessel is placed into the device, a powerful linear electromagnetic actuator pushes on a piston in the vessel, pressurizing the drug and ejecting a hair-thin jet at high pressure through the nozzle.

The device was developed by Ian Hunter, the George N. Hatsopoulos Professor in Thermodynamics, research scientist Catherine Hogan, and postdocs and students in the MIT BioInstrumentation Laboratory.