N.C.; Bulk micromachined Titanium microneedles

Abstract—Microneedle-based drug delivery has shown consid-erable promise for enabling painless transdermal and hypodermal delivery of conventional and novel therapies. However, this promise has yet to be fully realized due in large part to the limita-tions imposed by the micromechanical properties of the material systems being used. In this paper, we demonstrate titanium-based microneedle devices developed to address these limitations. Mi-croneedle arrays with in-plane orientation are fabricated using recently developed high-aspect-ratio titanium bulk microma-chining and multilayer lamination techniques. These devices include embedded microfluidic networks for the active delivery and/or extraction of fluids. Data from quantitative and qualitative characterization of the fluidic and mechanical performance of the devices are presented and shown to be in good agreement with finite-element simulations. The results demonstrate the potential of titanium micromachining for the fabrication of robust, reliable, and low-cost microneedle devices for drug delivery. [2006-0105] Index Terms—Biomedical engineering, drug delivery systems, microelectromechanical devices, micromachining titanium