Researchers at Queen's University Belfast's School of Pharmacy have developed a 3D-printed microneedle patch that mixes two skin-cancer drugs directly into the resin before it's ever printed, rather than dipping or coating the drug onto needles after the fact. The dissolvable patch, described in a paper published in Advanced Healthcare Materials, is aimed at delivering localized, minimally invasive treatment for skin cancer — a cancer type the researchers describe as the most frequently diagnosed cancerous disease.
The work comes out of a lab led by Prof. Dimitrios A. Lamprou, who holds Queen's Chair of Biofabrication and Advanced Manufacturing, with final-year PhD student Rutuja N. Meshram serving as first author on the study. The pair designed the microneedle array geometry in Tinkercad before turning to digital light processing (DLP) to print it — a vat-photopolymerization process in which a projector cures an entire cross-section of a resin vat in one flash rather than tracing it point-by-point with a laser. That whole-layer exposure is what makes DLP well suited to microneedle arrays: tiny, precisely tapered spikes that need consistent geometry across an entire patch to gently penetrate the outer layer of skin without drawing blood.
Why Embedding Beats Coating
Most microneedle drug-delivery research to date has followed a two-step playbook: print or mold the needle structure first, then coat the active drug onto the finished needles afterward. That approach works, but it constrains how much drug you can load, concentrates it near the needle surface, and adds a manufacturing step that has to be validated on its own. QUB's approach instead blends curcumin and 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) — a natural anti-inflammatory/anti-cancer compound and an established chemotherapy agent, respectively — directly into the printable resin before the patch is ever printed, in a single one-step DLP process. According to the university, this yields higher drug loading, better skin penetration, and a controlled two-stage release "tailored to meet each individual patient's needs." With the drug distributed through the needle's volume rather than concentrated at the surface, the outer, more exposed resin would be expected to release its payload first as the microneedle begins dissolving in skin, with the interior following as the structure breaks down further — though neither source spells out that staging in more granular detail. For a drug like 5-FU, which is cytotoxic and needs to stay concentrated at a tumor site rather than circulate systemically, that kind of staged, localized release is the whole point of using microneedles instead of a pill or an IV in the first place.
Lamprou, who led the research, framed the work around patient experience: "Skin cancer is a major public health concern, and current treatments often require repeated topical applications, invasive procedures, or can cause unwanted side effects," he said in the university's statement. "Minimally invasive microneedle systems that dissolve after application could provide a more patient-friendly, simpler and less painful way to deliver cancer medicines. Because the microneedles dissolve after use, they may also help reduce the risk of needle-stick injuries and decrease medical sharps waste." Meshram, the study's first author, tied the result to a broader shift in drug delivery: "Advanced manufacturing technologies such as 3D-printing are helping reshape the future of medicine by enabling more precise drug delivery and supporting personalised, patient-friendly healthcare," she said, adding that the team's findings "point to a future where medicines and vaccines can be delivered in ways that are less painful, easier to use, and more acceptable to patients than traditional injections." The researchers say the same one-step approach could extend to other next-generation delivery technologies, including vaccines. The study was supported by the Joint Commissioner, Education Branch, Social Welfare in Maharashtra, India.
What It Means for Makers
This is a pharmacy and biomedical-engineering story first, not a desktop-printer one — nobody is going to reproduce curcumin-loaded microneedles on a bench-top DLP unit, and the resin chemistry, drug-loading percentages, and dissolution testing sit well outside consumer hardware or off-the-shelf resins. But the underlying manufacturing logic is worth paying attention to if you work with resin printing at all, because it's the same logic driving interest in multi-material and functional-resin printing more broadly: DLP's whole-layer cure lets you treat the vat itself as a formulation problem, not just a geometry problem. Whatever is dissolved or suspended in that resin — a drug, a pigment, a conductive filler, a UV-reactive additive — gets locked into the part's volume in one pass, with its distribution set by print parameters rather than a downstream coating step.
That's the same principle behind embedded-electronics resin prints and gradient-property parts elsewhere in the AM research space: fewer post-processing steps generally means tighter, more repeatable control over where a payload ends up in the finished geometry. For makers watching where resin printing is headed outside of miniatures and jewelry, biomedical microneedle work like this is one of the clearer signals that DLP's real long-term value is as a formulation-and-fabrication platform, not just a high-resolution shape tool. It's also a reminder that a design tool as accessible as Tinkercad can sit at the front of a workflow that ends in a peer-reviewed medical device — the sophistication here is almost entirely in the resin chemistry and the print process, not the CAD.
Bottom Line
Microneedle patches are already a well-established idea in transdermal drug delivery — vaccines and cosmetic actives have used similar arrays for years — but most of that work has relied on molding, not 3D printing, and has treated drug loading as a separate coating problem. QUB's contribution is narrower and more specific than "3D-printed medicine": a single-step DLP process that embeds two named skin-cancer drugs into a dissolvable resin matrix and gets a controlled two-stage release out of the print itself. That's a materials-and-process result, published in a peer-reviewed journal, not a product — there's no indication in the available reporting of clinical trials, regulatory timelines, or a path to patients. What it does confirm is that additive manufacturing keeps encroaching further into pharmaceutical formulation, where the printer isn't just shaping a part but is, in effect, dosing it.
