Less Painful Shots May Come Courtesy of the Porcupine

From FierceDrugDelivery.com

The clever thing about North American porcupine quills is that they slip through the skin easily but they are really tough to get out. This is useful for the porcupine, not so good for the victim. But this defense mechanism could also have a use in drug delivery, for example, by leading to less painful or more robust needles that do less damage as they slip through the skin.The barbs on a porcupine quill act like a serrated knife, requiring about half the pressure to penetrate a surface than a quill without barbs.

Porcupines have about 30,000 quills of up to 10 cm long, and they have tiny backward-facing barbs on the last 4 mm of the quills. These barbs not only mean that the quills snag on the way out, but also make them slide into the skin more easily, needing around half the pressure needed for quills with no barbs. The barbs act like the serrations on a sharp kitchen knife, cutting cleanly and easily through a tomato.

Creating a needle that penetrates as easily as a porcupine quill but isn't as difficult to remove could mean a shot that is much less painful.

"For needles, we envision we could use 'swell-able' or degradable barbs, to enable easy penetration and easy removal," Jeffrey Karp of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital told BBC News.

Read the story at FierceDrugDelivery