Candidate: Hang Zhang
Title: 'Fabrication of Hollow Silicon Microneedle Arrays for Transdermal Biological Fluid Extraction'
Date: July 3, 2018
Time: 3:00 PM
Place: EIT 3151-53
Supervisor(s): Cui, Bo
Abstract:
Oral administration of drugs was considered as a conventional drug delivery method in the previous time, but some drawbacks came out gradually because such techniques are often not applicable for new protein based, DNA-based, and other therapeutic compounds produced by modern biotechnology. Applying transdermal patches to deliver drugs across the skin becomes an attractive approach for the patients who are suffering painful injection via a hypodermic needle. However, transdermal delivery, which relies on drugs passively diffusing across the skin, is severely restricted and hindered by low permeability of the outer 10-20 um of skin, the stratum corneum layer.
To increase skin permeability and reduce the pain simultaneously, the idea of combining the benefits of needle injection and transdermal patches is brought out resulting in the creation of the microneedle concept. This concept involves micron-size needles that has representative parts with generally hundreds of microns long, ones to tens of microns wide at the tip, and on the order of 100 um wide at the base. Such microneedles are appropriately long to penetrate through the outer layer of skin without interfering with the nerve endings in the deeper layer, making minimal invasive and painless sampling fashion.
This work presents an innovative double-side Deep Reactive Ion Etching (DRIE) approach for producing hollow silicon microneedle arrays.