The Danish company RobinTech has developed a method that can extract an extra dose out of every vial of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine.
The know-how of the Dragør-based firm RobinTech allows health workers to extract seven doses out of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine vial instead of six, TV2 reported.
According to RobinTech's estimates, this method will increase Denmark's COVID-19 vaccine capacity by 270,000 doses for April and May alone.
The method utilises a vaccine container, a syringe, and a smartphone to enhance the extraction of the doses from the vials. The key to the method is controlling the air intake in the vial, its angle during extraction, and where the vaccine is drawn from. The method is touted as easy to learn and takes health personnel about an hour to master.
RobinTech head Martin Vesterby called the invention "typically Danish practical thinking".
"When testing in the vaccination centres, they were unable to get seven doses out of the vial at any point", Martin Vesterby told TV2 News. "But the same people have managed to get seven doses every time with our solution".
Vesterby suggested the method has so far only been tried with the Pfizer vaccine, but could theoretically work for all vaccines.
At present, RobinTech is in negotiations with the State Serum Institute and the Capital Region regarding the possibility of deploying the method nationwide.
Originally, each vial of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine was designed to contain five doses, but it was subsequently reported that six doses could be extracted if using a certain type of syringe. The company later considered shipping fewer vaccines, taking into account there was an "additional" dose in each vial.
So far, Denmark has managed to vaccinate some 415,000, or roughly 7.1 percent of its population. Overall, the Scandinavian country has seen over 233,000 cases and over 2,400 deaths.
