Fabrication of 3-D Printed Hollow Microneedles Arrays for Gene Delivery Applications

Transdermal drug administration by hollow microneedle arrays (HMAs), provides a painless and hygienic alternative drug delivery systems for hypodermic (ordinary) injections. The delivery of different therapeutic medicines throughout the body has become challenging due to the strong barrier, like the Stratum Corneum. Several limitations like the slow rate of drug delivery through solid, coated, and dissolving microneedles may in TDD administration can be resolved using the Hollow microneedles (HMNs) which enables increased drug delivery rate as per the requirement. Thus, an investigation has been carried out to fabricate biocompatible resin-based HMAs with specific sizes using stereolithography (SLA) Form 3B 3D printer. This 3D printed HMAs integrated with a syringe connector shows a huge potential to deliver required medicines quickly and painlessly. In this study, an extensive research work has been carried out to develop a small HMAs of 6×6 needles with a hole inner diameter of 189-210µm with a height of 1.5mm fabricated using SLA 3D printer for gene delivery applications. A DMA 8000 was used for material strength test of HMN followed by electrophoresis and Wister rat was used for drug/ gene delivery ability as well as skin penetration, respectively.