Ice Microneedles

Doctors have developed a patch with ice micro needles for painless injections

Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science

Patch with ice microneedles / ©City University of Hong Kong.

Many medications have to be injected, although patients do not like to deal with needles, and for kids this is a whole test. Sometimes they can be replaced with microneedle patches: a small, patch-like applicator is placed on the skin, delivering the medicine quickly and completely painlessly. With the help of patches, they even try to introduce a vaccine against coronavirus.

Such microneedles are usually obtained from durable, but biodegradable polymers that quickly and safely "dissolve" in the body. However, recently, developers from the City University of Hong Kong demonstrated a new option using ordinary water ice: such needles penetrate shallowly under the skin and immediately melt, releasing the "payload" enclosed inside. This is reported in an article published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering (Chang et al., Cryomicroneedles for transdermal cell delivery).

Scheme of experiments on immunotherapy of laboratory mice using an array of ice microneedles / ©City University of Hong Kong.

Chenjie Xu and his colleagues were looking for a new method to deliver immune or stem cells to the right part of the patient's body. Such cell therapy is a very promising direction that can cope with many severe and poorly curable diseases. However, so far it remains complicated and expensive, and the introduction of cells requires a heavy jet injection of a "shock dose" or even a small surgical intervention.

Therefore, scientists from Hong Kong suggested using a patch with ice microneedles for this purpose. The cells are placed in their cavities and after the needles melt, they end up in the patient's body. The authors note that it is even easier to make them than microneedles made of polymers, and due to its own cold, ice simplifies the storage of cells in preparation for injection.

All this was demonstrated in experiments on cancer-stricken laboratory mice, to which scientists successfully injected ice microneedles with dendritic cells, triggering a pronounced immune response.

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