Fabrication of polystyrene microneedles for transdermal drug delivery

Currently, microneedles are attracting a lot of attention because microneedles can deliver drugs in patients without pain as opposed to conventional hypodermic needles. Furthermore, microneedles can be safely used by untrained people. Generally, microneedles consist of tens of micrometer-sized needles with the needle length ranging from 150 mu m to 2 mm. Several materials such as poly (lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA), polyglycolic acid (PGA), poly(l-lactic acid) (PLA) [2], maltose [3], stainless [4, 5], titanium [6] and ceramic have been used as materials for fabricating microneedles. This work aims to develop a fabrication process of plastic microneedles using polystyrene in a toluene solution. According to the experimental result, the fabrication process of polystyrene microneedles offers several advantages such as low cost, simple fabrication, and short processing time, whereas the properties of the fabricated polystyrene microneedles are suitable for practical applications. Furthermore, this proposed method can be used to fabricate replicas of microneedle master.