You Won't Have To Fear Injections Anymore, Thanks To Painless Microneedles That Dissolve Away

If you have a fear of needles, it won¡¯t be long before you won¡¯t have to worry when getting a shot at the doctor¡¯s office. A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas has instead developed a painless alternative to the conventional hypodermic needles we use today.

Their new method uses 3D-printed microneedles so thin they break off under the skin, dissolving as they releases the intended substance over time. It obviously wouldn¡¯t work for every kind of medication, but the needles would still be able to deliver a large variety of drugs, provided they¡¯re comprised of small molecules.

The researchers explain in their paper that the needles are 3D-printed using a technique called ¡°fused deposition modeling¡±, using polylactic acid, which is a renewable, biodegradable, thermoplastic material approved by the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration). The team members say they¡¯re able to create microneedles with tips as small as 1 micrometre or one millionth of a meter. To put that into perspective, a human red blood cell is approximately 5 micrometers wide. They can also manufacture different needle shapes with a 400-600 micrometre width.

Hypodermic needles, the current standard, can hurt while used to give injections, and can even leave ugly bruises and scars when not administered properly. Then there¡¯s also the fact that they¡¯re never reused (for health reasons obviously) and thus make huge amounts of biohazardous waste in hospitals that need to properly disposed of.

But with these new microneedles, the injections are completely painless, and they can also technically be used by anyone. In addition, because the needles themselves dissolve away under the skin, there¡¯s no waste byproduct either.

So far, while the needles have proven cheap to manufacture, the initial design requires expensive photolithographic equipment to make. However, they¡¯ve been very successfully tested on parafilm and pig skin, puncturing the skin and breaking off just as intended about 84 percent of the time. Perhaps, with more tweaking, that rate will climb higher.