Rationale polymer design and selection for microarray transdermal peptide delivery

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Microneedle devices are an attractive route towards painless injection of therapeutics. This administration route is attractive for the delivery of biologics such as peptide-based drugs as the microneedle can act as a stabilising environment for biologics and control their release. One route towards drug release from microneedles is through the disintegration of the material from which the needles are made after application of the microneedle patch. For reproducible drug delivery performance, both the material choice used for the microneedle matrix and the microneedle fabrication process play a critical role. The chemical composition of the microneedles has significant effect on both release rate and, potentially, on batch-to-batch consistency of release. The interplay between these parameters (material composition, processing characteristics) and the performance of peptide delivery through microneedles (peptide stability, amount of peptide loaded, peptide release profile) is not sufficiently understood to enable rational device microneedle design. In this project, we aim to systematically test different polymers for the microneedle device fabrication to establish a correlation between polymer properties, microneedle fabrication process parameters and the performance for peptide-based drug delivery. We will prepare microneedle devices from polymers with varying composition and length to modulate their chemical and mechanical properties and investigate how these properties affect physicochemical and drug release properties of microneedles. The ambition of the work is to ultimately lead towards a predictive tool that enables dialling in a specific microneedle property that is then linked to a suggested polymer composition that will provide the desired microneedle performance.