Prefilled Syringe Testing of In-Use Hospital Drugs

Overview

A prefilled syringe is a delivery device that ensures a safe, reliable, effortless, and dependable way to deliver a drug/medication to a patient in any setting necessary. Whether it be in an Operating Room or a hospital bed, prefilled syringes are meant to alleviate the issues of the multi-step process of manually drawing medicine from a vial with an empty syringe to then deliver to a patient. With adequate microbiological, chemical, and functional testing done on prefilled syringes one drug type at a time, at the Pharmaceutical company we focus primarily on the functional testing of the prefilled syringes to ensure their reliable use. Three machines, in particular, are used to determine the amount of forces required to push the plunger rod and twist the tip cap off of a syringe, and to ensure container closure integrity of the syringe tube itself while the drug resides inside. Four to five drug types have been tested in syringes in the past year and a half, with graphs and formal reports displaying their results. The FDA required each drug type to be tested in 3 batches of 60 syringes with their results then shared in a proper and backed-up manner so as to gain approval for the prefilled syringe’s use in hospitals for that particular drug type. The force results of the 4-5 drug types tested did not exceed the maximum forces able to be twisted for the tip cap or for pushing the plunger rod, and the air vacuum test has. Development of Novel FLT3 Inhibitors to Overcome Drug Resistant Leukemia Srestha Chattopadhyay Sylvania Northview High School, Sylvania, OH Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, and leukemia is responsible for significant fatalities in children. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society reported more than 23,000 deaths caused by leukemia in 2021. Current drug therapies induce cellular death through apoptosis. However, apoptosis can promote relapse and drug 79 resistance in cancer patients, so there is an urgent need to find alternate therapies. One such option can be to find alternate mechanisms of cancer cell death. Common cancer-targeting drugs promote FLT3 (a tyrosine kinase receptor) to mutate, promoting apoptosis, relapse, and chemoresistance against the drug. The dual objective is to study the effect of FLT3 inhibition on the percentage and type of cellular death. A high- throughput screening using a library of chemical compounds identified three prominent drugs that inhibit FLT3. The effects of these three drugs on cell death mechanisms of leukemic cells were studied using a microscope and CellTiter-Blue assay. The results collected provide evidence that an FLT3 inhibitor induces non-apoptotic death. While all three compounds showed significant cell death and similar IC50 values in the micromolar range, CST-16 was found to be most effective. In addition, the CST-16 drug causes methuosis, which is a very efficient non-apoptotic method of death. Therefore, it can be inferred from past studies that there will be less cancer relapse and drug resistance. Together, it is shown that inhibition of FLT3 can be a helpful strategy in clinics to treat drug-resistant leukemia in patients in the future.