Microneedles are being fast recognized as a useful alternative to injections in delivering drugs, vaccines, and cosmetics transdermally. Owing to skin's inherent elastic properties, microneedles require an optimal geometry for skin penetration. In vitro studies, using rat skin to characterize microneedle penetration in vivo, require substrates with suitable mechanical properties to mimic human ...

Previous work using glass microneedles to apply calibrated, localized force to neurons showed that tensile force is a sufficient signal for neurite initiation and elongation. However, previous studies did not examine the kinetics or probability of neurite initiation as a function of force or the rate of force application. Here we report the use of a new technique-magnetic bead force application...

In the past few years, a number of microneedle designs have been proposed for transdermal drug delivery of high molecular weight drugs. However, most of them do not increase the drug permeability in skin significantly. In other cases, designs developed based on certain criteria (e.g. strength of the microneedles) have failed to meet other criteria (e.g. drug permeability in skin, throughputs of...

Microneedles have emerged as a novel therapeutic modality in transdermal drug delivery system. The concept of microneedle has caught attention the investigators owing to its immense utilities and unique promising features painless by crossing impervious barrier layer stratum corneum skin efficiently non-invasive manner. It provides excellent potency bioavailability drugs compared most other con...

Unique microneedle arrays prepared from crosslinked polymers, which contain no drug themselves, are described. They rapidly take up skin interstitial fluid upon skin insertion to form continuous, unblockable, hydrogel conduits from attached patch-type drug reservoirs to the dermal microcirculation. Importantly, such microneedles, which can be fabricated in a wide range of patch sizes and micron...

Gene delivery systems can be divided to two major types: vector-based (either viral vector or non-viral vector) and physical delivery technologies. Many physical carriers, such as electroporation, gene gun, ultrasound start to be proved to have the potential to enable gene therapy. A relatively new physical delivery technology for gene delivery consists of microneedles (MNs), which has been stu...

Microneedle-mediated Transdermal and Intradermal Drug Delivery covers the major aspects relating to the use of microneedle arrays in enhancing drug delivery applications. It provides an overview of the various methods employed to design and produce microneedles, from the different materials involved to the importance of application methods. It carefully and critically reviews ongoing transderma...

Plasma technology has been widely used to increase the surface energy of the polymer surfaces for many industrial applications; in particular to increase in wettability. The present work was carried out to investigate how surface modification using plasma treatment modifies the surface energy of micro-injection moulded microneedles and its influence on drug delivery. Microneedles of polyether e...