Čes. slov. farm. 2019, 68(1):12-26 | DOI: 10.36290/csf.2019.002

Microneedles as a perspective for transdermal therapeutic systems

Tomáš Wolaschka

Katedra farmaceutickej technológie, Univerzita veterinárskeho lekárstva a farmácie v Košiciach, SR

Transdermal Therapeutic Systems (TTS) improve patient compliance especially due to its simple application and long-term action with the need to exchange the system every 12 hours to several days. The advantages also include elimination of first-pass effect, avoidance of gastrointestinal adverse effects, stable drug levels in the blood and simple discontinuation of therapy by patch removing. However, most drugs do not have the appropriate physicochemical properties to achieve therapeutic levels by transdermal application, therefore only a limited amount of drugs administered by this route is available on the market. Microneedles (MI) by their painless application appear to increase drug permeation when applied transdermally. In this review work, various types of MI (solid, coated, hollow, matrix, hydrogel forming) their size, shape, grouping, but also materials and technologies used in MI production are described. Finally, the work is focused on current clinical trials in which MI have been tested. MI with their unique properties have potential to increase the range of transdermally administered drugs currently applied by another route of administration. MI can simply pave the way for transdermal delivery to poorly penetrating small molecules as well as large molecules such as vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, or siRNA.

Keywords: clinical trials; microneedles; materials; shape; transdermal drug delivery; vaccine delivery

Received: February 25, 2019; Accepted: March 21, 2019; Published: January 1, 2019  Show citation