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Design and development of insulin microneedles for diabetes treatment

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Abstract

As a painless and minimally invasive method of self-administration, microneedle is very promising to replace subcutaneous injection of insulin for type I diabetes treatment. Since the introduction of microneedles, many scholars have paid attention to and studied this technology, which has made it developed rapidly. However, there is no product on the market or in clinical trials at present. The reason is that there are still many technical problems in microneedle drug delivery system, such as the perfect integration of stable, controllable, fast, long-lasting, safe, and other necessary conditions. Here, we review the achievements that researchers have made that contain one or more of the above factors, and put some ideas to solve the limitations of insulin delivery by microneedles for reference.

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Modified from Chen et al. [48]

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The datasets used or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the support of Wuya College of Innovation of Shenyang Pharmaceutical University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, 103 Wenhua Road, Shenyang, 110016, China

    Qida Zong, Ranran Guo, Naijun Dong, Guixia Ling & Peng Zhang

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  1. Qida Zong
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  2. Ranran Guo
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  4. Guixia Ling
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Contributions

Qida Zong: collected important background information and drafted the manuscript. Ranran Guo and Naijun Dong: proofread and revised the contents of the manuscript. Guixia Ling and Peng Zhang: contributed to the conception of this study; helped with constructive discussions and performed manuscript review.

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Correspondence to Peng Zhang.

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Zong, Q., Guo, R., Dong, N. et al. Design and development of insulin microneedles for diabetes treatment. Drug Deliv. and Transl. Res. 12, 973–980 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13346-021-00981-y

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