Development of Microneedles for Painless Drug Delivery

The enormous potential offered by transdermal drug delivery can be exploited well using microneedles which are tiny projections designed to just penetrate through top skin layers. Most methods reported in the literature for microneedle fabrication are expensive  and rather sophisticated, which is major deterrent to translation of the technology to mass manufacturing. Our team has developed a molding platform, which is not only cost effective, but also offers the flexibility of altering the geometry of the master template as per requirement. This innovation is featured on the front cover of the journal “Macromolecular Materials and Engineering.” We have also developed a generic syringe retrofit hollow microneedle device, which is currently under large scale animal trials at inStem, Bengaluru and PGIMER, Chandigarh. Patent applications have been filed for both the innovations.

References:

Kedar Badnikar, Shreyas N Jayadevi, Suman Pahal, Sukruth Sripada, Manjunatha M Nayak, Praveen K Vemula, and Dinesh N Subrahmanyam. Generic molding platform for simple, low-cost fabrication of polymeric microneedles. Macromolecular Materials and Engineering, 305(5):2000072, 2020.

Suman Pahal, Kedar Badnikar, Vivek Ghate, Utkarsh Bhutani, Mangalore Manjunatha Nayak, Dinesh Narasimhaiah Subramanyam, and Praveen Kumar Vemula. Microneedles for extended transdermal therapeutics: A route to advanced healthcare. European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics, 159:151–169, 2021.

Patents:

Master mold assembly for fabrication of microneedles, January 9 2020. Indian Patent Filed Application No 201941019470.

Hollow microneedle device, December 2 2020. Indian Patent Filed Application No 201941050005.