Specialized cavitation seed for sonophoresis

Abstract

Sonphoresis can increase skin permeability to various drugs in transdermal drug delivery (TDD) and cavitation is recognized as the predominant mechanism of sonophoresis. In order to increase cavitation activity on the skin surface, dense liquid phase gas core cavitation seed was designed instead of commercially available ultrasound contrast agents (UCAs). The effect of specialized cavitation seed in sonophoresis was quantitatively analyzed with high performance liquid chromatography. Ferulic acid was used as target drug molecule to be delivered into porcine skin. The results indicate that specialized cavitation seed can increase the amount of delivered ferulic acid approximately 2,000 folds while a commercial UCA does not improve the efficiency of TDD. We expect the developed specialized cavitation seeds could be used widely for various skin related applications.