This project explores ablative fractional laser as a minimally invasive tool to generate skin microchannels to facilitate transcutaneous drug delivery and vaccination.

Various patch systems are developed to allow powder drugs to be loaded for convenient delivery via laser-generated skin microchannels. Laser-based powder delivery takes advantage of water evaporated from skin microchannels to dissolve topical drugs to initiate the dual-phase delivery (dissolution/diffusion). Laser-based powder delivery enables highly efficient delivery of water-soluble chemical drugs and also biologics drugs. Such a dual-phase delivery platform can sustain drug release from hours to a week, often resulting in improved drug availability and therapeutic efficacy.

Laser-based powder delivery can also be used for high-efficient transcutaneous vaccination. Laser-based power vaccination eliminates needle injection and has the ability to minimize vaccine/adjuvant-induced local adverse reactions by delivery of a small fraction of doses to skin microchannels that are surrounded by unaffected skin with full recovery ability. Laser-based powder vaccination can also elicit more potent immune responses than needle-based injection delivery by induction of tissue stress to alert local innate immune systems of danger.