The push for smart pills that know where and when to deploy the drugs they carry has produced some interesting twists on this approach. But one pill under development by MIT scientists has produced a pill that would look at home in the prop department for The Knick — a pill spiked with needles designed to deploy medicine more effectively into the walls of the GI Tract.
At first glance needles and pills don’t look they would go very well together. So, why? As the author of The Atlantic article that highlighted the technology pointed out, it would be for biologics which tend to be injected but for whatever reason that method isn’t practical. For instance, the patient can’t stand needles.But as an MIT statement on the pill points out, there are no pain receptors in the GI tract, so patients would not feel any pain from the drug injection.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
But a test of the needle laden pill showed that it successfully delivered insulin to pigs because a coating protects the pill when it is initially swallowed and only dissolves when the pill reaches the gastrointestinal tract, revealing the pill’s 5 mm needles. That study, co-authored by Giovanni Traverso, a research fellow at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General and Carl Schoelhammer, an MIT grad student in chemical engineering, was published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Medicine.
The idea is it could be used to improve adherence for patients who have to self-administer injections. The technology could also be applied to vaccinations, particularly for children and adults averse to needles. are the co-authors of the study.But aside from adherence issues, Traverso points out that the delivery method is also more effective than injectables that go into the skin.
“The kinetics are much better, and much faster-onset, than those seen with traditional under-the-skin administration,” Traverso says. “For molecules that are particularly difficult to absorb, this would be a way of actually administering them at much higher efficiency.”
There is still some ways to go on the needle pill’s development. Traverso and Schoelhammer are looking at how to make the pill biodegradeable before it exits the body.
