Rationale polymer design and selection for microarray transdermal peptide delivery

微针装置是一种有吸引力的无痛注射疗法的方法。这种给药途径对生物制剂的输送很有吸引力，例如基于多肽的药物，因为微针可以作为生物制剂的稳定环境并控制它们的释放。从微针释放药物的一种途径是在应用微针贴片后通过分解制造针的材料。对于可重复的药物输送性能，用于微针基质的材料选择和微针制造工艺都起着关键作用。微针的化学成分对释放速率和潜在地对批次间释放的一致性都有显著影响。这些参数(材料组成、加工特性)和通过微针传递多肽的性能(多肽稳定性、多肽负载量、多肽释放谱)之间的相互作用还没有被充分了解，从而无法进行合理的装置微针设计。在这个项目中，我们的目标是系统地测试用于制造微针器件的不同聚合物，以建立聚合物性能、微针制造工艺参数和基于多肽的药物输送性能之间的相关性。我们将从不同组成和长度的聚合物中制备微针装置，以调节其化学和机械性能，并研究这些特性对微针的物理化学和药物释放性能的影响。这项工作的目标是最终实现一种预测工具，该工具能够拨号输入特定的微针属性，然后将其链接到建议的聚合物组合物，该聚合物组合物将提供期望的微针性能。

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.