Plastic Prefilled Syringes: A Better Fit for Autoinjector Systems

This article is part of PharmTech's supplement "Injectable Drug Delivery."

More than two billion prefilled syringes are developed and used each year. The rise of the prefilled syringe as the preferred container for injectable drugs began with Sanofi and Rhône-Poulenc Rorer's successful introduction of syringes for heparins to the European market in the early 1980s. The prefilled syringe market has expanded considerably because of factors such as the growth of biopharmaceuticals, the need to eliminate overfills, the need for precise delivery volumes, the desire for convenient delivery, the quest for cost effectiveness, and the goal of reducing dosage errors (1–4).

Currently, most prefilled syringes are made of glass, but plastic syringes are gaining popularity, particularly in applications for which glass is an unsuitable delivery system. In the last decade, pharmaceutical protein and peptide drug products have been approved for use with prefilled plastic syringes. One example is a peptide drug product in a Daikyo Crystal Zenith (CZ) syringe (Daikyo Seiko, Tokyo) (see Figure 1). More products using plastic prefilled syringes are in various phases of drug development.