Advances in microneedle-based therapy for bone disorders

• Published in: Biomedicine & pharmacotherapy 2023-09, Vol.165, p.115013-115013, Article 115013
• Main Authors: Lin, Zengping, Zheng, Kanghua, Zhong, Jiping, Zheng, Xufeng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bone disorders; Drug delivery; Microneedles; Rheumatoid arthritis
• ISSN: 0753-3322; 1950-6007
• DOI: 10.1016/j.biopha.2023.115013

Bone-related disorders treatment is a serious public health concern, imposing a significant social and economic burden on patients and healthcare systems. Although conventional drug delivery systems have made advances in bone diseases prevention and management, the limited delivery efficiency and convoluted focal environment lead to inadequate drug absorption and lack of specificity to achieve the intended therapeutic impact. Microneedle-based therapy represents an extraordinarily safe and well-tolerable therapeutic approach for treating bone disorders, providing improved efficacy by breaking down the barriers and delivery of therapeutic components to the target sites with programable release profiles in a less invasive manner. Over the past decades, numerous significant achievements in the development of various types of drug-carried microneedles have been made to address the obstacles encountered in the bone-treating procedure, enabling the microneedle-based therapy to take an important step in practical applications. In this light, this review summarizes these remarkable researches in terms of microneedles types and drug delivery strategies, with the goal of demonstrating the benefits of exploiting microneedle-based therapy as a novel strategy for treating bone-related disorders. The remaining challenges and future perspectives are also discussed in the hope of inspiring more efficient and intelligent bone treatment strategies.