Cancer Treatment in a Painless Patch

Mechanical engineering undergraduate student, Teo Wilkening, spent this past summer working with Professor Morteza Gharib to test the preliminary design for an alternative—and possibly much less painful—method of chemotherapy drug delivery through a patch. To avoid the pain caused by the large needle traditionally used for such an intravenous injection, the team envisioned a patch containing hundreds of micrometer-scale needles, too small in diameter to be sensed by the nerves in the skin. [Caltech story]