Regarding the increasing prevalence of cancer throughout the globe, the development of novel alternatives for conventional therapies is inevitable to circumvent limitations such as low efficacy, complications, and high cost. Recently, microneedle arrays (MNs) have been introduced as a novel, minimally invasive, and low-cost approach. MNs can delivery both small molecule and macromolecular drugs or even nanoparticles (NPs) to the tumor tissue in a safe and controlled manner. Relying on the recent promising outcomes of MNs in transdermal delivery of anticancer agents, this review is aimed to summarize constituent materials, fabrication methods, advantages, and limitations of different types of MNs used in cancer therapy applications. This review paper also presents the potential use of MNs in transdermal delivery of NPs for effective chemotherapy, gene therapy, immunotherapy, photodynamic, and photothermal therapy. Additionally, MNs are currently explored as routine point-of-care health monitoring devices for transdermal detection of cancer biomarkers or physiologically relevant analytes which will be addressed in this paper. Despite the promising potential of MNs for cancer therapy and diagnosis, several limitations have impeded their therapeutic efficacy and real-time applicability that are addressed in this paper.
Keywords: Cancer therapy; Diagnosis; Immunotherapy; Microneedle arrays; Photodynamic therapy; Photothermal therapy.