Droplet-born air blowing: Novel dissolving microneedle fabrication

The microneedle-mediated drug delivery system has been developed to provide painless self-administration of drugs in a patient-friendly manner. Current dissolving microneedle fabrication methods, however, require harsh conditions for biological drugs and also have problems standardizing the drug dose. Here, we suggested the droplet-born air blowing (DAB) method, which provides gentle (4-25 degrees C) and fast (<= 10 min) microneedle fabrication conditions without drug loss. The amount of drug in the microneedle can be controlled by the pressure and time of droplet dispenser and the air blowing shapes this droplet to the microneedle, providing a force sufficient to penetrate skin. Also, the introduction of a base structure of two layered DAB-microneedle could provide complete drug delivery without wasting of drug. The DAB-based insulin loaded microneedle shows similar bioavailability (96.6 +/- 2.4%) and down regulation of glucose level compared with subcutaneous injection. We anticipate that DAB described herein will be suitable to design dissolving microneedles for use in biological drug delivery to patients. (C) 2013 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.