Submitted by: Boris Stoeber
Could your flu shot be pain-free? Not this year, but painless needles may be the Next Big Thing, according to Prof. Boris Stoeber.
He is developing painless microneedles for drug delivery and biosensing via the skin. These hollow needles can be tiny enough not to cause pain during usage. Stoeber collaborates with colleagues at the Department of Dermatology and the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences on vaccine delivery into the skin and on methods to use these needles to measure drug levels in the body. Stoeber’s laboratory is developing new fabrication technologies to make these tiny structures in an inexpensive way using solvent casting. In order to optimize this process they are observing the associated evaporation-driven flow fields in sub-milimetre thin fluid films.