On July 30, Korea University (KU)'s Guro Hospital and Osong Medical Innovation Foundation (KBIO) developed an “automatic vaccine extraction technology” that can distribute the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine to syringes according to the appropriate quantity.

Currently, the amount of the COVID-19 vaccine that can be used would be 5 to 10 times of injections per bottle, therefore the medical team had to distribute an appropriate amount of vaccines to each syringe through repetitive work. This manual work caused a total of 426 cases of misinoculation by July 16 due to the mistake of vaccine distribution failure. However, this newly developed technology will allow even inexperienced medical staff to easily and accurately distribute vaccines to syringes, and reduce the fatigue of the medical team when inoculators are all used up at once. Furthermore, it is expected that the maximum number of people will be vaccinated by minimizing the remaining amount of the vaccine through the synergy effect with the Low Dead Space (LDS) syringe currently used in Korea.

Professor Cho Geum Joon of obstetrics and gynecology at Guro Hospital, who participated in the development, stated that “In previous cases, ideas derived from medical sites could not be implemented as technology and disappeared, but this time, the technology could be materialized with the active support of KBIO.” He also claimed that the hospital will make continuous efforts to develop the domestic medical services and strengthen the competitiveness of Korea’s medical device industry through various cooperative research.