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Solid Fiber Inside of Capillary and Modified Fusion-Spliced Fiber Optic Microneedle Devices for Improved Light Transmission Efficiency.

Jason N MehtaBrianna E MoralesJohn H RossmeislWaldemar DebinskiChristopher G Rylander
Published in: Journal of medical devices (2022)
Convection-enhanced delivery (CED) is a drug delivery technique used to deliver therapeutics directly to the brain and is a continually evolving technique to treat glioblastoma. Early versions of CED have proven to result in inadequate drug volume dispersed (V d ), increasing the likelihood of tumor recurrence. Fiber optic microneedle devices (FMDs) with the ability to deliver fluid and thermal energy simultaneously have shown an ability to increase V d , but FMDs have historically had low light transmission efficiency. In this study, we present a new fabrication method, solid fiber inside capillary (SFIC) FMD, and a modified fusion splicing (FS) method with the goal of increasing light delivery efficiency. The modified FS FMD resulted in an increase in light transmission efficiency between 49% and 173% compared to previous prototypes. However, the FS FMD resulted in significantly lower transmission efficiencies compared to the SFIC FMD (p ≤ 0.04) and FS FMDs perform much worse when light-absorptive materials, like black dye, are placed in the bore. The light absorption of a candidate cytotoxic agent, QUAD-CTX, appear to be similar to water, and light delivery through FS FMDs filled with QUAD-CTX achieves a transmission efficiency of 85.6 ± 5.4%. The fabrication process of the SFIC FMDs results in extremely fragile FMDs. Therefore, the use of a modified FS FMD fabrication process appears to be better suited for balancing the desire to increase light transmission efficiency while retaining a sturdy FMD construction.
Keyphrases
  • drug delivery
  • emergency department
  • multidrug resistant
  • klebsiella pneumoniae
  • brain injury
  • cancer therapy