Micro-needle skin patches could help fight antibiotic resistance

With a growing number of infections becoming harder, if not impossible, to treat, antibiotic resistance is widely considered to represent one of the biggest worldwide threats to health. There are a number of contributing factors to this growing resistance but a key driver is our reliance on oral antibiotic tablets, which bring the drugs into close contact with gut bacteria, effectively creating a perfect breeding ground for resistance.

Under development by a team of researchers from Queen’s University Belfast, the micro-array patches painlessly penetrate the top layer of skin to deliver a drug, thus bypassing the gut bacteria and potentially extending the lifespan of useful antibiotics.

“One of the biggest problems is that the huge majority of the drugs are taken orally,” explained the project’s leader Ryan Donnelly, Professor of Pharmaceutical Technology. “This means that a small quantity of the compound often finds its way into the colon, creating the perfect breeding ground for drug-resistant bacteria.”