Medical interventions often require timed series of doses, thus necessitating accurate medical record-keeping. In many global settings, these records are unreliable or unavailable at the point of care, leading to less effective treatments or disease prevention. Here we present an invisible-to-the-naked-eye on-patient medical record-keeping technology that accurately stores medical information in the patient skin as part of microneedles that are used for intradermal therapeutics. We optimize the microneedle design for both a reliable delivery of messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics and the near-infrared fluorescent microparticles that encode the on-patient medical record-keeping. Deep learning-based image processing enables encoding and decoding of the information with excellent temporal and spatial robustness. Long-term studies in a swine model demonstrate the safety, efficacy and reliability of this approach for the co-delivery of on-patient medical record-keeping and the mRNA vaccine encoding severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This technology could help healthcare workers make informed decisions in circumstances where reliable record-keeping is unavailable, thus contributing to global healthcare equity.
This work was also supported in part by the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant P30-CA14051 from the National Cancer Institute. We would like to thank the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) for (INV-007842) supporting this project. This work was supported, in whole or in part, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [INV-007842; A.J., R.L.], and Takeda Fellowship from MIT-Takeda Program [Y.L.].
The authors would like to thank Alejandro Lancho and Alexander Fengler for discussion about error-correction codes.
@article{Han25OPMR,
author = {Han, Jooli and Kanelli, Maria and Liu, Yang and Daristotle, John L. and Pardeshi, Apurva and Forster, Timothy A. and Karchin, Ari and Folk, Brandon and Murmann, Lukas and Tostanoski, Lisa H. and Carrasco, Sebastian E. and Alsaiari, Shahad K. and Wang, Erika Yan and Tran, Khanh and Zhang, Linzixuan and Eshaghi, Behnaz and Levy, Lauren and Pyon, Sydney and Sloane, Charles and Lin, Stacey Qiaohui and Lau, Alicia and Perkinson, Collin F. and Bawendi, Moungi G. and Barouch, Dan H. and Durand, Fr{\\'e}do and Langer, Robert and Jaklenec, Ana},
title = {On-patient medical record and mRNA therapeutics using intradermal microneedles},
journal = {Nature Materials},
year = {2025},
month = {2},
volume = {24},
pages = {794--803},
doi = {10.1038/s41563-024-02115-4},
type = {Journal Article}
}