Increasing Patients’ Preference Towards Auto-Injectors For Drug Delivery

Companies in the injectable drug delivery devices market are increasingly focusing on the manufacturing of auto injectors. Auto injectors are fully automated, highly customized and reusable injectors that can be used by a patient to make hundreds of injections. Patients can control the speed of dose delivery to help minimize pain or discomfort during an injection. These devices have the ability to adjust the speed and depth of the automatic injection. For instance, LISA™, a reusable auto-injector manufactured by Unilife Corporation, comes with an array of highly customizable features including Bluetooth LE connectivity, Wi-Fi or 3G connectivity, and pre-injection drug warming for target therapies. The injectable drug delivery technology market is expected to show significant growth in the coming years, due to various technological advances and new product launches in order to improve the convenience and ease of administration of parenteral therapeutics.

The injectable drug delivery devices market consists of sales of conventional syringes, needle-free injectors, auto injectors and pen injectors. The market includes the sales of injectable devices that have been extensively utilized for various routes of drug administration, such as intravenous, subcutaneous, intradermal, intra-peritoneal, and intra-muscular and others, to treat medical conditions ranging from cancer to autoimmune disorders. The injectable drug delivery devices used in hospitals, clinics and home care settings are included in this market.

The global injectable drug delivery devices market is expected to decline from $16 billion in 2019 to $15.4 billion in 2020 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of -4%. The decline is mainly due to the Covid-19 outbreak resulting in other patients delaying their episodes of care. The market is then expected to recover and reach $21.3 billion in 2023 at a CAGR of 7.4%.

Emergence of alternative drug delivery devices to injectable drug delivery devices is negatively affecting the market. Injectable (parenteral) drug delivery is a widely used conventional drug delivery system. There are many alternative (painless) drug delivery systems such as nasal, transdermal, transmucosal, vaginal, anal, and others which are evolving. The selection of drug delivery system depends on drug release, absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination profile of the therapeutic agent in order to achieve highest level of safety and efficacy from the drug. Alternative drug delivery systems hold key importance in improving bioavailability, reducing toxicity, and safety elimination of drug which is administered to treat a particular disease. Growing disease related complications, regular developments in drugs, and combinations of therapeutic agents are used to treat diseases, thus driving the need of alternative drug delivery systems. There are some recent ongoing developments in the field of alternative drug delivery system mainly in nanoparticles-based delivery system, intracellular delivery system, neural delivery system, and many more. Thus, emergence of alternative drug delivery methods limits the growth of the injectable drug delivery devices market.