The recent COVID-19 pandemic brought the healthcare systems in many countries to their knees. One of the key problems that became evident early on was the lack of diagnostic tools that were rapid and readily accessible to the public.
Diagnostics is what we do as a research team. Naturally, we contemplated what we could do in a situation like this. The result is a perspective article published in Precision Nanomedicine, the official journal of the European Foundation for Nanomedicine.
The conclusion? Microneedle systems excel in many ways as a diagnostic tool. Various microneedle platforms have demonstrated advantages of portability, self-administrability, affordability and scalability over other diagnostic platforms. The potential is huge but the technology is still in its infancy. We need more research to turn that potential into tangible clinical benefits, but we can’t do it alone. Cross-disciplinary collaboration and stakeholder support will be needed to drive this effort forward.
The article is published under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, so please feel free to distribute widely, adapt and reuse for non-commercial purposes, and share any derived work, citing:
Dixon RV, Lau WM, Moghimi SM, Ng KW (2020) The diagnostic potential of microneedles in infectious diseases. Precision Nanomedicine 3(4):629–640 . https://doi.org/10.33218/001c.13658