Microneedle Pill Could Eliminate Some Injections
By Chuck Seegert, Ph.D.
Oral delivery of certain biologic drugs is currently very limited, but with a new capsule laden with microneedles, internal injection may now be possible. Bypassing the stomach, the microneedle pill efficiently delivers drugs into intestinal tissue.
The stomach often exhibits extreme acidity and contains a host of enzymes and digestive proteins that are extremely effective at digesting drugs — breaking them down before they can perform their therapeutic action. In order to deliver certain biologics, or protein-based drugs, an injection is required. Many patients, however, would prefer to take an oral medicine instead of getting an injection. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a potential solution to these problems.
The innovative new technology is a capsule coated with microneedles. When swallowed, the capsule injects drugs directly into the lining of the digestive tract, according to a recent press release.
“This could be a way that the patient can circumvent the need to have an infusion or subcutaneous administration of a drug,” said Giovanni Traverso, a research fellow at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, in the press release.
The new concept was tested in swine using insulin as a model drug, according to a study published by the team in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Delivery of the large biologically active molecule, insulin, was efficient and had improved bioavailability. The microneedle capsule was also passed all the way through the test animals’ gastrointestinal tract, indicating the potential safety of the approach.
“The kinetics are much better, and much faster-onset, than those seen with traditional under-the-skin administration,” Traverso said in the press release. “For molecules that are particularly difficult to absorb, this would be a way of actually administering them at much higher efficiency.”
Finding alternatives to drug injection is a focus for many research teams. In addition to the microneedle pill, use of dermal patches continues to receive attention. The ability of the skin to exclude larger molecules like insulin has made it difficult to administer the drug through a patch, but with an ultrasonic push, patches may be viable.
Image Credit: Christine Daniloff/MIT, based on images by Carol Schoellhammer and Giovanni Traverso