Sugar micro needles as transdermic drug delivery system.

We designed and fabricated an array of sugar micro needles of the length ranging from 150 micro m to 2 mm for transdermic delivery of drugs. Micro needles were molded out of maltose mixed with pharmaceutical material, being expected bio-degradable in the human skin. To test basic tolerance to the healthy human skin, a clinical experiment was carried out for 10 healthy adult volunteers. 500 microm-needles containing 5 wt% of ascorbate-2-glycoside were inserted into the skin of the forearm and snapped off to be left in the skin. They spontaneously dissolved by hydrolysis to release ascorbate in the epidermis and the dermis. No dermatological problems were observed in terms of the International Contact Dermatitis Research Group criteria. These observations indicate that the present system is a novel approach to achieve transdermic drug delivery.