Modelling transdermal delivery of high molecular weight drugs from microneedle systems

In the past few years, a number of microneedle designs have been proposed for transdermal drug delivery of high molecular weight drugs. However, most of them do not increase the drug permeability in skin significantly. In other cases, designs developed based on certain criteria (e.g. strength of the microneedles) have failed to meet other criteria (e.g. drug permeability in skin, throughputs of the drugs, etc.). It is obvious therefore that in order to determine the ‘optimum’ design of these microneedles, the effect of different factors (e.g. length of the microneedle, surface area of the patch, etc.) along with various transport properties of drug transport behaviour using microneedles should be determined accurately. Appropriate mathematical models for drug transport from these systems into skin have the potential to resolve some of these issues. To address this, a parametric analysis for transdermal delivery of a high molecular weight drug from a microneedle is presented in this paper. The simulations have allowed us to identify the significance of various factors that influence the drug delivery while designing microneedle arrays. A scaling analysis is also done which shows the functional dependence of drug concentration on other variables of skin and microneedle arrays.