DERMISONICS GETS NOTICE OF ALLOWANCE FROM PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE FOR U-STRIP APPLICATION

Medical devicemaker Dermisonics has announced that it has received a Notice of Allowance from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for its second U-Strip patent application, concerning an ultrasonic drug-delivery system.

The U-Strip system employs an unusual form of sonic energy to facilitate the expansion of the pores of the skin, enlarging the pores to the point where large molecule drugs can be deposited into the dermis and into the bloodstream.

The second application uses an alternating sonic transmission instead of a conventional ultrasound, which uses a sine wave transmission. With conventional ultrasound a tremendous amount of thermal energy can be developed which perforates the skin, potentially leading to skin damage. This process, called sonophoresis, has many drawbacks including the tendency to destroy many of the drugs desired for active delivery purposes. The alternating waveform, a sawtooth wave to square wave, expands the skin pores without perforating the skin and without burning the tissue or denaturing the drug.