A material covered with octopus-like suckers could provide a simple, needle-free way to deliver drugs or other treatments through the skin.
To develop a less painful alternative to the hypodermic needle, at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea and her colleagues designed a rectangular patch made of soft, stretchy and transparent rubber a few centimetres long and wide. One side is smooth, and the other is coated with suction cups, each about 3 millimetres across. Lee says the team made these suction cups to mimic the suckers on an octopus’s tentacles, shaping them like tiny cups with a domed protuberance in the middle.
The researchers reasoned the suckers on the patch could clamp onto skin, deforming it and temporarily reducing its ability to make a physical barrier. If the skin was first smeared with a drug solution, some of the medication would be able to soak through the outermost layer to the tissue below.
Advertisement
To test this idea, the researchers tried attaching the patch to several samples, including pig skin, skin from a human cadaver and a type of artificial skin. In each case, they found the patch performed as hoped, leaving skin temporarily more permeable to substances such as vitamin A1 and the antibiotic ramoplanin.
Specifically, the compounds penetrated up to two-fifths of the way through the skin. The drugs reached the topmost layer of the epidermis – the stratum corneum – which is characterised by low permeability. What’s more, the drugs continued to absorb for about 30 minutes after the patch was removed.
Lee and her colleagues also tested whether the patch would cause skin irritation. Volunteers who wore the patch on their arm for 6 hours experienced less redness than is usually associated with wearing plastic surgical tape.
at King’s College London says it is very important to find ways to deliver drugs without needles, because doing so could make it cheaper and easier for people to self-administer drugs at home. Theoretically, the patch could be used in clinics because it is simple, portable and does not need an energy source such as a battery. But more data is needed to determine exactly which drugs it would work best with, he says.
Lee says that the patch could also be used with cosmetic products such as moisturisers or wrinkle treatments.
ACS Nano
