Drug delivery devices are the containers and devices that hold an injectable medicine and deliver it into the body: glass vials, rubber stoppers, prefilled syringes, cartridges for pen injectors, and auto-injectors. Because they touch the medicine, the industry calls them primary packaging, or containment and delivery systems.
A vial is a small glass bottle, sealed with a rubber stopper and an aluminium cap. A nurse pushes a needle through the stopper to draw the medicine out. A prefilled syringe already holds one dose, so no one has to draw it from a vial. A pen injector holds a cartridge with several doses, and the user dials each dose. Insulin pens are the best-known example in India. An auto-injector hides the needle. The user presses it against the thigh, and a spring pushes in the needle and then the plunger.
The container matters most for biologics, medicines made from living cells, such as antibodies and vaccines. These are large protein molecules, and they are easily damaged. Chemicals released from rubber or glass can harm them. So can tiny particles, or the silicone oil that lines the inside of a syringe. So the container maker tests what its materials release into the medicine. Each container design is tested with each medicine before the medicine is approved. The container must also stay sealed, so that no germs get in during months of refrigerated storage and transport in the cold chain.
Consider a biologics plant in Hyderabad that fills an antibody medicine into prefilled syringes. The medicine is grown in a bioreactor and then purified. A filling line in a clean room fills 10,000 syringes in one batch, each with 1 mL. Cameras inspect every syringe for particles and cracks, and the line rejects the faulty ones. The manufacturing execution system (MES) records which batch of syringes and which batch of stoppers went into each batch of medicine. If a fault is later found in one batch of stoppers, the plant can trace every syringe that used them.
Software appears in two places here. In the factory, it runs the inspection and records every batch. In the patient's hand, some pens and auto-injectors are connected. They record the time and size of each dose, and send them to an app on the patient's phone over Bluetooth.
In hospitals, the vials and syringes are often loaded into an infusion pump, which then delivers the medicine at a set rate.