Design and Manufacturing of Microneedles Toward Sustainable Products

Abstract

Microneedles can be used for drugs delivery instead of conventional hypodermic needles with some advantages: they cause less pain and skin irritation, the risk of transmitting infection is less important and they can be more economical to manufacture. A presentation of different families of microneedles and their advantages compared to conventional needles can be found in the first part of this paper. Then, current manufacturing processes of microneedles are presented and discussed, followed by the proposition of an innovative manufacturing strategy to make a patch composed of hollow microneedles. This strategy combines micro machining processes to make an insert that will be use during injection moulding. At last, the concept of sustainability is presented with the aim to start discussion on the sustainable aspects of the designed microneedles, and then provide some answers