The diagnostic potential of microneedles in infectious diseases

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has taught us much about our weaknesses in the management of infectious disease outbreaks. A key lesson has been the need for more effective point-of-care diagnostic tools that not only produce rapid and reliable results, but also facilitate decentralised testing to avoid overwhelming central test facilities when demand peaks in an outbreak. Microneedle devices can be inserted painlessly into the skin to detect biomolecules in the epidermal and dermal layers. They have been used to detect biomarkers both in the interstitial fluid and the capillary blood. Importantly, they are amenable to self-administration. In this article, we provide an overview of existing microneedle-based diagnostic technologies and discuss how they may be built upon to provide effective diagnostic tools for infectious diseases in general.