Therapy areas
Transdermal drug delivery (TDD) provides several advantages over injections and oral administration and the market is growing at double-digit growth rates.
| Benefits over injections |
Benefits over oral |
- No pain and swelling at injection site
- Discrete and convenient
- Improves patient compliance
- Controllable dosing profile
- No infectious waste
- Large potential to reduce health costs
|
- Reduces gastro-intestinal side-effects
- Avoids first pass metabolism
- Eliminates multiple dosing per day
- Eliminates dose fluctuation due to diet
- Much higher compliance
|
The limitation of conventional passive transdermal delivery systems (TDS)
Although transdermal application of drugs is a very powerful administration route, there are still very few patches on the market.
By 2003 just 35 patch products have been approved by the FDA covering only 13 different drug molecules.
The reason for this is that only a few molecules are able to pass the outer skin layers passively to finally reach the blood capillaries in the dermis. The outermost layer, the stratum corneum in particular, provides a strong barrier for molecules larger than 500 Dalton.
The solution - intraepidermal drug delivery (IEDD)
To overcome the above mentioned limitations, Pantec Biosolutions has developed a laser based skin poration method (P.L.E.A.S.E.®) allowing intraepidermal delivery of large and poorly permeating molecules.
| 
