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Active compounds for skin therapy are usually delivered via skin. The outermost layer of the skin, stratum corneum, however, is largely responsible for the vital barrier function of the skin. Therefore, various transdermal drug delivery systems such as a patch, metered-dose transdermal spray, solid microneedle,and dissolving microneedle have been developed to increase the penetration of the active compounds. Especially, dissolving microneedle, which body is made of biodissolving material, is widely used in cosmetics and medical purposes due to its unique advantages; such as permeability of drug, minimum of pain and varied drugs delivery. It is very important to encapsulate the proper amount of drug in dissolving microneedle for an effective skin therapy. Although quantitative analysis of drugs in microneedle is significant to load the appropriate amount of drug in drug delivery, a suitable quantification method has not been established. Therefore, we developed a method for quantitative analysis of biodegradable microneedle. Epidermal growth factor (EGF) was selected as a target drug which has extensively been used for wrinkle treatment and wound healing, and we fabricated biodegradable microneedle patch through droplet air blowing (DAB) method. Due to the character of the biodegradable microneedle carrying a trace amount of drug, the liquid chromatography electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (LC-ESI-MS) was used for an accurate and quick analysis. However, since the body of biodegradable microneedle consists of polymer which makes ion source jams, solid phase extraction (SPE) method was used to separate polymer from the microneedle. The peak of EGF appeared 4 minute and the quantitative precision was 94.12% and quantitative accuracy was 98.7%. This study provides that the quantification method to analyze a trace amount of drug rapidly and precisely.
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