Parametric study of microneedles for transdermal drug delivery

Microneedles are known as devices that are able to deliver wide range of drugs without any pain or bleeding. Generally, in case of medical devices,recognition and investigation of the factors affect their performance is essential so that the fabrication of the ideal design will be attainable. In case oftransdermal drug delivery applications, rate of drug transport through tissue is the key feature which can determine how efficient drug administrationprocess is. For efficient drug delivery there should be a possibility of prediction then controlling the rate of drug transport. This research aims todevelop a parametric study to link microneedle design parameters such as different shapes of needles (cylindrical, conical, candle-like, cylinderwith hemispherical end), or different needle distributions on the patch (square, circular or diamond), with the effectiveness of drug deliveryin the form of steady state diffusive flux. In case of candle-like microneedle, results from the numerical simulations reveal that, by increasing the wallangle of the conical part of this shape the values of the diffusive flux increases. Consequently, cylindrical microneedle and square distribution provide the highest diffusive flux, in comparison to other types. Furthermore, an optimization algorithm for conical shape of microneedle hasbeen conducted by PSO MATLAB code, to make a correlation between microneedle geometry parameters and drug delivery efficiency to find theoptimum values of microneedle design parameters

Keywords:

Microneedle , Drug delivery , Numerical simulation , drug flux