Polyamidoamine (PAMAM) dendrimers have been topically applied to the skin and utilised as a permeation enhancer for a range of therapeutic compounds. However, very little is known about the mechanism of enhancement. This study used optical coherence tomography (OCT) to investigate the influence of PAMAM dendrimers to alter surface refractive index (RI) in excised porcine skin. It is revealed that PAMAM dendrimers caused a sporadic disruption and disappearance of the white hyper-reflective band on the skin surface using OCT. Following the decontamination of the treated skin specimens, the entrance signal, resulting in the polarised light reflecting off the keratin of the upper skin strata, returned to normal. Further, PAMAM-induced changes in skin RI was benchmarked against glycerol, a known permeation enhancer and skin clearing agent. Changes in RI with PAMAM were only observed on the skin surface, suggesting that the dendrimer only modulates the outer layers of the stratum corneum. This is substantially different to the observed effect of glycerol, which permeated more deeply into the skin. The non-invasive and non-destructive OCT imaging technique may provide a convenient tool to investigate the mechanism of permeation enhancement and transdermal drug delivery.

Date Published: 1 March 2013
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 8580, Dynamics and Fluctuations in Biomedical Photonics X, 85800G (1 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2004754

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8580:
Dynamics and Fluctuations in Biomedical Photonics X
Valery V. Tuchin; Donald D. Duncan; Kirill V. Larin; Martin J. Leahy; Ruikang K. Wang, Editor(s)