This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Skin is remarkably good at keeping things out of the body. Typically, that's a positive.
It becomes an issue when medicine needs to get in. Swallow a pill to treat a skin condition, and the medicine enters your stomach, moves into your bloodstream and travels throughout your body—all to reach a problem in your skin. Applying the drug directly seems simpler.
But the skin's outer layer blocks most medicines meant to treat it. Mark Prausnitz, a Regents' professor, Regents' entrepreneur and J. Erskine Love Jr. chair in Georgia Tech's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has spent years trying to get medication through that barrier.
He says his solution looks a little like a tiny spiny creature or a centuries-old weapon. "Like the ball and chain of medieval times, with all those spikes sticking out of the ball," Prausnitz said. "Or like a porcupine." Only much, much smaller.
Prausnitz calls them STAR particles because tiny microneedles project from each particle like the points of a star. Mix them into a cream or gel, rub them across the skin, and they create microscopic openings that give medicine a way through. The work is published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.
The idea grew out of microneedle patches, which are already used to help drugs penetrate the skin. Patches are best suited to small areas. But conditions such as eczema and psoriasis can affect broad or irregular parts of the body where Prausnitz said patches would be impractical.
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