Monitoring of glucose permeability in monkey skin in vivo using Optical Coherence Tomography

Topical trans-dermal delivery of drugs has proven to be a promising route for treatment of many dermatological diseases. The aim of this study is to monitor and quantify the permeability rate of glucose solutions in rhesus monkey skin noninvasively in vivo as a primate model for drug diffusion. A time-domain Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) system was used to image the diffusion of glucose in the skin of anesthetized monkeys for which the permeability rate was calculated. From 5 experiments on 4 different monkeys, the permeability for glucose-20% was found to be (4.41 +/- 0.28) 10(-6) cm/sec. The results suggest that OCT might be utilized for the noninvasive study of molecular diffusion in the multilayered biological tissues in vivo.