Veryst and colleagues from Merck & Co Inc. are excited to share their recently published paper "Coring and Fragmentation of Elastomeric Needle Shield in a Pre-Filled Syringe" in the PDA Journal of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology. The team used a combined experimental- and simulation-based approach to develop models of needles inserted into rubber stoppers to predict elastomer fragments in the needles. This failure mode can lead to poor injection performance and patient harm, so improving system design and component selection is critical to patient safety. The team tested and simulated the response of five different materials to understand and create predictive models of the failure mechanism, enabling future design improvements and needle selection.
The work is published in the May 2025 issue of the journal and is available here.