Advances in the Design of Transdermal Microneedles for Diagnostic and Monitoring Applications

Abstract

Due to their intrinsic advantages over classical hypodermic needles, microneedles have received much attention over the last two decades and will likely soon appear in clinics. Although the vast majority of research is focused on designing microneedles for the painless delivery of drugs, their applications for diagnostic purposes have also provided promising results. In this paper, the main advances in the field of microneedles for diagnostic and patient monitoring purposes are introduced and critically discussed.

Minimally invasive method for the point-of-care quantification of lymphatic vessel function

“…However, intradermal injections, performed with conventional hypodermic needles, require special training of health professionals and are difficult to standardize (31). Potentially, this issue could be addressed by using microneedle-based injection systems that deliver molecules to a predetermined depth in the skin (31)(32)(33). Indeed, in our recent work, we developed 400-to 500-μm-long dissolving solid polymeric microneedles made of a mixture of poly(N-vinylpyrrolidone) (PVP) and ICG.…”

Engineering Microneedles for Therapy and Diagnosis: A Survey

“…Swellable MNs are normally utilized in both drug delivery and biosensing owing to their excellent swellability [15,32,106]. When swellable MNs pierce skin, the biological fluids are absorbed into the MNs, owing to their polymeric crosslinking network structure and hydrophilic groups.…”

“…However, many of them typically focus on a specific aspect, such as materials science and manufacture [26], glucose monitoring [27], polymeric MNs' application [14], diagnostics [28,29], and drug delivery [30,31]. The systematical review, which elaborates on the basic knowledge and main points of MNs, and covers the latest application of diagnosis and therapy, is still in its infancy [32]. This review aims to summarize the recent achievements in MN-based devices from materials, fabrication methodologies, and geometrical structures to applications (Figure 1).…”

The diagnostic potential of microneedles in infectious diseases

“…However, a hollow microneedle device was developed to extract ISF from the skin and transfer it into a chamber containing either immobilised anti-CD4 T+ cell antibodies (to detect human immunodeficiency virus or HIV) or antibodies against Ebola capsid glycoproteins (to detect Ebola virus). The cell/ligand binding events were measured by electrical impedance [75]- [77].…”