Advances in porous microneedle systems for drug delivery and biomarker detection: A mini review

At present, microneedles have been widely used in transdermal drug delivery and detection due to their painless and non-invasive advantages, among which porous microneedles have great potential in dry or liquid drug delivery and disease monitoring due to their interoperable pore structure. However, previous literature paid little attention to the porous microneedles, and worse, most of them focused on the preparation methods of the porous microneedles used for drug delivery, while the matrix materials of porous microneedles and the potential for biomarker detection were rarely mentioned. The purpose of this review is to summarize the commonly used matrix materials for porous microneedles and highlight the ongoing challenges and prospects of their application in transdermal drug delivery and disease detection.