With advances in engineering technology and nanomaterials, scientists have access to many new and intriguing nanostructures composed of a variety of materials. Nanotubes have become a hot topic in the area of drug delivery because of their high strength and ability to carry molecules both on their outsides and insides. Meanwhile, despite our progress in medical technology, the needle is still almost exclusively used as a vaccine delivery device. The use of needles leads to serious distress in children, and indoctrinates us with a negative view of doctors and health care that can last a lifetime. Platforms to spare people the needle are seriously lacking, or they still have pain associated with their delivery.

The goal of our project here is to leverage the strength of nanotubes to penetrate the skin and deliver vaccines painlessly through the first few layers of skin. Vaccines are the most challenging medical applications because they consist of large molecules, therefore the system should be easily applicable to other substances if it can work with vaccines. Also, small quantities of vaccine or vaccine-like molecules can induce an easily measurable response in vivo. This is a simple way to measure the effectiveness of our platform for general drug-delivery. Taking into consideration of all aspects, we plan to develop an advanced system for an efficient transdermal delivery of vaccines. Therefore, in our proposed transdermal device, we will be using chips embedded with tubes of nanometer diameter, which show similarity in the perforation of the SC but, due to their reduced dimensions, they offer the additional advantage of excluding the simultaneous entrance of microbial pathogens.

1. Zhuolin Xiang, Hao Wang, Aakanksha Pant, Giorgia Pastorin, and Chengkuo Lee, Development of vertical SU-8 microtubes integrated with dissolvable tips for transdermal drug delivery, Biomicrofluidics, vol. 7, no. 2, 026502, 2013. [PDF] [DOI]