There’s an upside to administering drugs in the backside. For patients unable to swallow, a cheaper and less infection-prone alternative to IV drugs is actually infusion through the derrière – a route being taken by Bay Area startup Hospi Corp.
The company just received a $700,000, Phase 2 SBIR for its device that helps docs administer drugs in rectum, and it’ll use to funding to continue studying the pharmacokinetics of its rectally administered drug delivery mechanism. It essentially uses a catheter, dubbed the Macy catheter after the nurse who invented it, to infuse a drug suspended in liquid into the highly absorptive rectal mucosa. This is mainly meant to be used in the hospice setting, and the company plans to use the grant to help this Macy catheter to be used more conveniently in a number of clinical settings.
The backstory (pun certainly not intended there) for this invention’s worth a read. But the case for going up the rectum: It takes a lot of money, monitoring and training to effectively use an IV – not always the best option for a patient in hospice. Suppositories can be embarrassing, and subcutaneous, sublingual and intranasal drug delivery techniques have their own range of cost and efficacy limitations, Hospi says.
The catheter actually stays in place during waste elimination thanks to an inflated retention balloon placed in the rectum that’s smaller than stool – so it won’t need to be administered several times, the company says.
Earlier this year, Hospi received 510(k) status for this catheter.
