Development of artificial skin using keratin film for evaluation of puncture performance of microneedle

Humans do not feel pain when bitten by mosquitos; therefore, we have attempted to develop a microneedle that mimics the puncturing mechanism of mosquitos. We have quantitatively evaluated the puncturing performance of the developed microneedle by puncturing an artificial skin made from polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a kind of silicon rubber. Unlike the monolayered PDMS, however, animal skin including human skin is structured to have a hard stratum corneum, epidermis and dermis over soft subcutaneous tissue. In this paper, we propose an artificial skin having a two-layered hard/soft structure, constructed from PDMS with a human-hair-derived keratin film adhered onto the top surface. We evaluated the hardness of the keratin film (Young’s modulus) and found that it could qualitatively simulate the hard layers of the skin including the stratum corneum. The artificial skin we developed reproduced the following phenomena: the decrease in resistance force of animal skin at the point when the needle penetrates the surface followed by variation in resistance due to the stick-slip phenomenon as the needle penetrates more deeply.