Integrated Microneedle Arrays and Assembly Techniques for Drug Delivery Applications

Inhalt:
There is significant interest and effort towards the development of microneedle arrays to provide a pain-free, controlled and sustained release of therapeutics to various tissues. However, current approaches involve expensive clean room processing techniques that produce microneedle arrays coupled to rigid substrates that do not conform to underlying biological tissues. In this work, we describe the design and development of 2-D arrays of hollow glass microneedles embedded in flexible PDMS (polydimethyl siloxane) substrates. This method combines the precision and accuracy of photolithographic techniques for mold construction with the economy of replica molding and confined etching techniques for low cost, high precision micromanufacturing approaches.