EpiPen Automatic Medicine Injector

If you have severe allergies, EpiPen or another brand of epinephrine autoinjector might one day save your life. A bee sting, a single particle of food, or a new medication might serve as the trigger. Your airways might close and your blood pressure would drop. Once those symptoms begin, you have only a few moments to medicate yourself before you go into shock or lose consciousness. 

EpiPen enables you to act without hesitation. Just jab the hand-held cylinder into your thigh and the spring-loaded syringe instantaneously penetrates your muscles and injects a large dose of epinephrine (also called adrenaline) into your body. Quickly absorbed, it unblocks your lungs and boosts your heart rate to counteract severe allergic reactions.

Before the introduction of EpiPen in 1987, those with severe allergies relied on kits with a vial of epinephrine and a needle. Opening the kit and manipulating the vial and syringe was hard to manage, especially if someone was going into shock. The EpiPen enables users to react within seconds. 

The autoinjector was developed by Sheldon Kaplan at Survival Technology as a way to deliver small volumes of medicine rapidly in emergencies, including for military and space‑program use. Yet allergic reactions posed challenges as great as those involved in space flight. 

The first involved the container itself. Treating allergic reactions required a larger container, and it could not be made of stainless steel, which caused epinephrine to break down on contact.

After careful materials testing, Kaplan developed a tempered glass canister large enough to hold the epinephrine and strong enough to stand up to bumps and drops. He also created a carefully calibrated spring and syringe that injected the proper dosage, no matter a person's body type, weight, or injection angle. 

The result was a biomedical engineering breakthrough that provides an extra margin of safety for millions of people worldwide.