Surgery – Means for introducing or removing material from body for... – Treating material introduced into or removed from body...
Patent
1997-11-27
2000-10-17
Coggins, Wynn Wood
Surgery
Means for introducing or removing material from body for...
Treating material introduced into or removed from body...
604 57, 12820313, A61M 1300
Patent
active
061323942
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
The present invention relates to a medicament chamber in an inhalation apparatus, including a device for the regulation of moisture.
Until recently, the commonly used inhalation apparatus has comprised a medicament mixture packed in an aerosol container for dispensing a finely powdered medicament as a spray into the respiratory organs of a patient. However, the environmental hazards produced by propellants used in aerosol containers have recently led to the development of various types of powder inhalators.
The prior known powder inhalators can be constructed such that the medicament involves the use of individual capsules or the apparatus is provided with a medicament chamber which contains a plurality of doses and is used for metering the medicament with various types of metering devices into the inhalable air. This provides a possibility of storing the medicament either in a pure non-diluted form or with some appropriate additive added therein. In order to secure the effective and reliable operation of the apparatus in view of delivering a desired amount of medicament into the airways of a user and also providing accurate metering, the powdered medicament must possess certain physical and chemical properties. Several of these properties, such as the fluidity, agglomeration, capacity, morphology or the like of a powder, are affected by moisture. Medicaments and/or additives are often hygroscopic and/or sensitive to chemical or morphological changes in high-moisture environments. Thus, operation of the apparatus can be detrimentally affected by moisture, i.e. the composition of a powder and the amount of medicine particles to be inhaled may be considerably reduced, whereby the metering or dosage will be inaccurate and dosage concentrations will be inconsistent. It should also be noted that the inhalator is often used for long periods of time and, thus, the above problems will be further pronounced.
In apparatus provided with a medicament chamber and a metering device, the above problems are also quite obvious. The prior art discloses a variety of solutions to these problems, based on fitting the inhalation apparatus with a container disclosing a desiccant e.g. silica gel. For example, the publication WO 92/09322 discloses an inhalation apparatus having its medicament chamber provided with a lid whose internal wall can be fitted with a chamber containing a desiccant. Correspondingly, in an apparatus as disclosed in the publication WO 89/01348, the inhalation chamber has its end wall fitted with a desiccant-containing compartment, the inflowing air being absorbed through said compartment.
In the device discribed in detail in U.S. Pat. No. 4,274,403, the medicament chamber is separated from the desiccant container by means of a porous layer. In these prior art devices, the desiccant is included in a capsule located in connection with a separate medicament chamber and provided with a suitable moisture-permeable wall or membrane, which thus forms a separate component in the capsule. The junctions between the membrane and the rest of the capsule may develop problems in terms of tightness and, thus, the assembly is not absolutely reliable as some of the desiccant may find its way within the medicament. This is not acceptable when the question is about an inhalation medicament.
Furthermore, in these prior known devices the desiccant container is in contact with ambient air. The desiccant must be capable of drying both the ambient air and the medicament. Thus, in order to achieve a desired drying effect, it is necessary to use a considerable excess of desiccant relative to the moisture content of the medicament.
An object of the present invention is to eliminate the above drawbacks and to provide a medicament chamber for a powder inhalator, wherein the capacity of the desiccant is only used for the elimination of internal moisture in the medicament chamber in such a manner that the desiccant and the powdered medicament are not even in a slightest contact with each other. By using silica gel or some other agent pos
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Coggins Wynn Wood
Leiras Oy
Thanh Loan H.
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