Conventional drug delivery methods mainly include subcutaneous injection and oral administration. Subcutaneous injection has the advantages of delivering the correct concentration, but it might cause pain and trauma to patients. Although oral administrations do not accompany pain as the subcutaneous injection, unexpected side effects may occur because they undergo digestion process and it is not easy for many drugs to be exposed to targeted sites with proper concentration. While dissolving microneedles have been extensively studied to overcome the limitations of conventional subcutaneous injection, the effects on microneedle shapes for drug release have not been fully explored. In this study, the characteristics of hyaluronic acid microneedles for cone and quadrangular pyramidal shapes were examined by the size, volume, contact surface area, skin permeability, and dissolution rate. As a result, the cone shapes of hyaluronic acid microneedles had high skin permeability, and the quadrangular pyramid of shapes hyaluronic acid microneedles showed a fast dissolution rate, given by the large contact area on the skin. Based on the results, we could confirm that the shape of a dissolving microneedles can affect skin permeability and the drug delivery rate.
