AcademicArticleSCO_85010866730

abstract

• ©The Electrochemical Society. Transdermal drug delivery using microneedles is a minimally invasive procedure which causes little or no pain. We present a novel method for fabricating microneedles using the Carbon-MEMS (C-MEMS) process. The fabrication of an array of hollow microneedles combining UV photolithography and carbonization of a polymer precursor is demonstrated. The shrinkage of the SU-8 microneedles during pyrolysis was analyzed and the pyrolyzed carbon needle structures were characterized using Raman spectroscopy to determine the extent of sp2 vs sp3 carbon hybridization. Using energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy we also analyzed the chemical composition of the microneedles. We report here for the very first time the fabrication of glassy carbon hollow microneedles.