Shadow mask assisted droplet-born air-blowing method for fabrication of dissoluble microneedle

A droplet-born air-blowing method is an advanced method of the drawing lithography enables simple and fast fabrication, which does not require UV irradiation or moulding process. However, it has disadvantages such as low throughput in the formation of droplet array as it uses the dispenser to make droplets one by one. To increase the throughput while also simplifying the fabrication method, we suggest a novel fabrication method for microneedles array (MNs array) using the shadow mask, which can fabricate the microneedles array uniformly. Furthermore, our method enables us to control the amount of polymer in the microneedle by adjusting the hole dimension as well as the thickness of the shadow mask. Here, we established the use of a shadow mask to form multiple droplet array at one time and then achieved microneedles array from the droplet array by drawing lithography in a short time (≤ 10 min). We anticipate that shadow mask assisted drawing lithography will be suitable to improve the fabrication throughput of dissoluble microneedle for new generation of drug delivery system.