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Painless and controlled on-demand drug delivery is the ultimate goal for the management of various chronic diseases, including diabetes. To achieve this purpose, microneedle patches are gaining increased attention. While degradable microneedle (MN) arrays are widely employed, the use of non-dissolving MN patches remains a challenge to overcome. In this study, we demonstrate that crosslinking gelatin methacrylate with polyethylene glycol diacrylate (PEGDA) is potent for engineering non-dissolving MN arrays. Incorporation of MoS 2 nanosheets as a photothermal component into MN hydrogels results in MNs featuring on-demand release properties. An optimized MoS 2 -MN array patch formed using a hydrogel solution containing 500 μg mL -1 of MoS 2 and photochemically crosslinked for 5 min shows required mechanical behavior under a normal compressive load to penetrate the stratum corneum of mice or pig skin and allows the delivery of macromolecular therapeutics such as insulin upon swelling. Using ex vivo and in vivo models, we show that the MoS 2 -MN patches can be used for loading and releasing insulin for therapeutic purposes. Indeed, transdermal administration of insulin loaded into MoS 2 -MN patches reduces blood glucose levels in C57BL/6 mice and mini-pigs comparably to subcutaneously injected insulin. We believe that this on-demand delivery system might alter the current insulin therapies and might be a potential approach for delivery of other proteins.

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), based on the enhancement of the Raman signal of molecules positioned within a few nanometres from a structured metal surface, is ideally suited to provide bacterial-specific molecular fingerprints which can be used for analytical purposes. However, for some complex structures such as bacteria, the generation of reproducible SERS spectra is still a challenging task. Among the various factors influencing the SERS variability (such as the nature of SERS-active substrate, Raman parameters and bacterial specificity), we demonstrate in this study that the environment of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria deposited on ultra-thin silver films also impacts the origin of the SERS spectra. In the case of densely packed bacteria, the obtained SERS signatures were either characteristic of the secretion of adenosine triphosphate for Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) or the cell wall and the pili/flagella for Escherichia coli (E. coli), allowing for an easy discrimination between the various strains. In the case of isolated bacteria, SERS mapping together with principal component analysis revealed some variabilities of the spectra as a function of the bacteria environment and the bactericidal effect of the silver. However, the variability does not preclude the SERS signatures of various E. coli strains to be discriminated.

There has been significant interest in the use of peptides as antimicrobial agents, and peptide containing hydrogels have been proposed as biological scaffolds for various applications. Limited stability and rapid clearance of small molecular weight peptides pose challenges to their widespread implementation. As a common approach, antibacterial peptides are physically loaded into hydrogel scaffolds, which leads to continuous release through the passive mode with spatial control but provides limited control over drug dosage. Although utilization of peptide covalent linkage onto hydrogels addresses partially this problem, the peptide release is commonly too slow. To alleviate these challenges, in this work, maleimide-modified antimicrobial peptides are covalently conjugated onto furan-based cryogel (CG) scaffolds via the Diels-Alder cycloaddition at room temperature. The furan group offers a handle for specific loading of the peptides, thus minimizing passive and burst drug release. The porous nature of the CG matrix provides rapid loading and release of therapeutic peptides, apart from high water uptake. Interfacing the peptide adduct containing a CG matrix with a reduced graphene oxide-modified Kapton substrate allows "on-demand" photothermal heating upon near-infrared (NIR) irradiation. A fabricated photothermal device enables tunable and efficient peptide release through NIR exposure to kill bacteria. Apart from spatial confinement offered by this CG-based bandage, the selective ablation of planktonic Staphylococcus aureus is demonstrated. It can be envisioned that this modular "on-demand" peptide-releasing device can be also employed for other topical applications by appropriate choice of therapeutic peptides.

A myriad of topical therapies and dressings are available to the clinicians for wound healing skin, but only a very few have shown their effectiveness in promoting wound repair due to challenges in controlling drug release. To address this issue, in this work, a near infrared (NIR)-light activable cryogel based on butyl methacrylate (BuMA) and poly(ethylene glycol) methyl ether methacrylate (PEGMEMA) incorporated with reduced graphene oxide (rGO) was fabricated. The obtained cryogel provides the required hydrophilicity beneficial for wound treatment. The excellent photo-thermal properties of rGO allow for heating the cryogel, which results in subsequent swelling of the cryogel (CG) followed by release of the encapsulated drug load, cefepime in our case. Without photothermal activation, no release of payload was observed. The potential of this bandage for wound healing was examined using an ex vivo human skin model infected with Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus). Apart from the efficacy of the cryogel based wound healing system, our results also suggest that the ex vivo wound model evaluated here provides a rapid and valuable tool to study superficial skin infections in humans and test the efficacy of antimicrobial agents.

Drug loaded hydrogels have proven to be versatile controlled-release systems. We report here on heat active hydrogel formation by mixing graphene oxide (GO) or carboxyl enriched reduced graphene oxide (rGO-COOH) with metformin hydrochloride, an insulin sensitizer drug currently used as the first line therapy to treat patients with type 2 diabetes. The driving forces of the gelation process between the graphene-based nanomaterial and metformin are hydrogen bonding and electrostatic interactions, weakened at elevated temperature. Using the excellent photothermal properties of the graphene matrixes, we demonstrate that these supramolecular drug reservoirs can be photothermally activated for transdermal metformin delivery. A sustained delivery of metformin was achieved using a laser power of 1 W cm-2. In vitro assessment of the key target Glucose-6 Phosphatase (G6P) gene expression using a human hepatocyte model confirmed that metformin activity was unaffected by photothermal activation. In vivo, metformin was detected in mice plasma at 1 h post-activation of the metformin loaded rGO-COOH gel.