Intradermal Injection video | Perpendicular Injection with Uneedle

Intradermal drug delivery

The intradermal route of administration offers several therapeutic benefits:

Effective targeting of the immune system

The skin is our body's main defence layer to the outer world  and therefore rich in antigen presenting cells.  Through these APCs the immune system can be very effectively targeted, which makes intradermal delivery very interesting for both prophylactic or therapeutic vaccination. Skin vaccination has been demonstrated to provide dose sparing (reduction of the required amount of vaccine compared to intramuscular injection)  with a factor 3-10x for many vaccines, including influenza and COVID-19.


For the same reason intradermal delivery is also very interesting in allergy desensitization therapies

Direct access to the skin

Intradermal drug delivery provides direct access to the skin and is the preferred route of administration for many therapies for skin diseases. Also many aesthetic treatments such as fillers, boosters and neurotoxins are administrated directly to the skin.

Fast systemic uptake

The capillary bed of the skin provides for fast systemic uptake of injected drugs. This property offers great opportunity in diabetes therapy through an insulin/glucagon regulating artificial pancreas.

Perpendicular injection

Given the above, intradermal injection is emerging as the preferred route of administration for many innovative therapies. However, the standard-of-care method for intradermal injection, the almost a century old "Mantoux technique" performed with an ordinary hypodermic needle, is complex and unreliable. Recent scientific literature suggests that about 70% of the intradermal injections performed with the Mantoux technique fail and actually end up in the hypodermis. Hereby, the Mantoux technique impedes pharmaceutical innovation and there is a clear and urgent need for an easy-to-use but reliable intradermal injection method.

Uneedle's silicon microneedle technology allows for perpendicular injection,  an innovative approach to intradermal injection which is reliable and easy to perform.  The microneedle is fully inserted until the hub loosely touches the surface of the skin and and then the fluid is simply injected at a controlled depth of about 1 mm.  The result is a clearly visible bleb/wheal on the skin, which is the hallmark of a successful intradermal injection.

Last but not least, due to the extreme small size and super sharp tip of our microneedles, needle fear and pain are strongly reduced.