Silica needle template fabrication of metal hollow microneedle arrays

Drug delivery through hollow microneedle (HMN) arrays has now been recognized as one of the most promising techniques because it minimizes the shortcomings of the traditional drug delivery methods and has many exciting advantages-pain free and tunable release rates, for example. However, this drug delivery method has been hindered greatly from mass clinical application because of the high fabrication cost of HMN arrays. Hence, we developed a simple and cost-effective procedure using silica needles as templates to massively fabricate HMN arrays by using popular materials and industrially applicable processes of microimprint, hot embossing, electroplating and polishing. Metal HMN arrays with high quality are prepared with great flexibility with tunable parameters of area, length of needle, size of hollow and array dimension. This efficient and cost-effective fabrication method can also be applied to other applications after minor alterations, such as preparation of optic, acoustic and solar harvesting materials and devices.