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Scientists Are Working On Ways To Swap the Needle For a Pill (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: One team of scientists, from MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital, developed a system to deliver insulin that actually still uses a needle -- but is so small you can swallow it and the injection doesn't hurt. They built a pea-size device containing a spring that ejects a tiny dart of solid insulin into the wall of the stomach, says gastroenterologist Carlo Giovanni Traverso, an associate physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital. "We chose the stomach as the site of delivery because we recognized that the stomach is a thick and robust part of the GI tract," Traverso says. Once the device gets into the stomach, the humidity there allows the spring to launch the insulin dart. As the researchers report in the journal Science, they've tested the device on pigs, and it can deliver a therapeutic dose of insulin provided the pig has an empty stomach.
On the other side of the U.S., nanoengineer Ronnie Fang of the University of California, San Diego and his colleagues have a different delivery system. Theirs is a kind of ingestible microrocket, about the size of a grain of sand, that is designed to zip past the stomach and into the small intestine. "It actually propels [itself] using bubbles in a reaction of magnesium with biological fluids," Fang says. The rocket has a coating that protects its payload from the acidic and enzyme-filled environment of the stomach. Once the rocket enters the small intestine, the change in acidity causes the coating to dissolve and lets the rocket stick to the intestinal wall to release its payload, in this case a vaccine protein. As Fang and his colleagues report in Nano Letters, their delivery system works in mice, but human testing is probably many years off.
On the other side of the U.S., nanoengineer Ronnie Fang of the University of California, San Diego and his colleagues have a different delivery system. Theirs is a kind of ingestible microrocket, about the size of a grain of sand, that is designed to zip past the stomach and into the small intestine. "It actually propels [itself] using bubbles in a reaction of magnesium with biological fluids," Fang says. The rocket has a coating that protects its payload from the acidic and enzyme-filled environment of the stomach. Once the rocket enters the small intestine, the change in acidity causes the coating to dissolve and lets the rocket stick to the intestinal wall to release its payload, in this case a vaccine protein. As Fang and his colleagues report in Nano Letters, their delivery system works in mice, but human testing is probably many years off.
As a guy who has been using it for at least ten years, most of the time it doesn't hurt. Even when it does, it is not massive pain.
Great! Only $3.14 million a year.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Eat a spring-loaded micro-injection pill to accomplish a minor convenience. What could go wrong. Yeah don't work on curing cancer, make a bullshit product instead. Great work Harvard/MIT money-grubs.
Get people less obese, then we have to need to stick needles in them or shove more stuff down their throats (they already shove too much anyway)
People aren't always diabetic simply because they're over-weight idiot -- and, sometimes, alternate diets, to help mitigate the effects, and taking insulin can actually make weight management more difficult.
For example, Halle Berry, Nick Jonas, Sharon Stone, Jay Cutler have Type 1 Diabetes, while Tom Hanks, Salma Hayek have Type 2.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Look forward to having 30 cent insulin needles be replaced with 300 dollar pills, not even talking about the actual insulin of course
It's shocking how out of touch medical science can be. The problem with shots - for people who have fear of them - was never about the pain. It was the bone-deep aversion to sharp objects being stuck in the skin. Just knowing it's going in. Whether it hurts or not is utterly irrelevant. A "painless" needle is just as uncomfortable as a painful one. Perhaps even more so, because at least with the physical pain it can disctract you from the thought of what the needle entails. It's difficult to understand for those who have no problem with needles. Think of it as an aversion to nails scratching the chalkboard. It's not any physical pain that's the cause of the discomfort (obviously no physical pain is entailed in such a scenario). But it's still maddening.
Scientists... please contact and get user feedback before you develop drugs. Don't just push what you think is best, because it will look good in a high impact journal publication and win you that next round of funding...
Reminds me of "Innerspace".
You never expect irony, do you?
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I watched the lozenge take another man
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Sorry. That just doesn't ring for me like the original.
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Two things I didn't see mentioned in the linked article, but will be addressed at some point, is the fact that the dose of insulin can vary wildly depending on current blood glucose level (take more to get it back to the target), and food consumption (more food = more insulin). (So lots of pills of a single dose, several pills of varying doses, or fill the pills yourself?)
The other thing I don't recall seeing was how fast the body absorbs the insulin delivered into the stomach lining compared to the (roughly) 30 minutes delay after injecting into the fatty tissue that is typical for the fast acting insulins.
If instead of magnesium it used a sodium reaction it would propel itself much faster, and at the same time would provide a dramatic cure for constipation.
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
I'm not going to shill for a specific pharmaceutical product by mentioning it's name, but oddly enough, DVR and I-don't-watch-commercials-or-not, I managed to notice there is a product on the market that is an inhaled version of insulin.
contrary to common belief there is not much protein there. Go on indulge as you please.
What happens when the insulin dart is a dud, it hits some food, doesn't pierce the stomach, etc. There is no verification it worked.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
I can hear Q's narration in my head: "Now pay attention, 007. This pill contains a magnesium micro-rocket that ignites on contact with stomach acid. The blue pill delivers a needle with a fast-acting poison, and the red pill implants a tracking device that will remain embedded in the intestinal lining for up to two weeks. If you should use one...please, do us both a favor and don't recover it!"
I remember going shopping with my mom and they'd have boxes of single use syringes on the shelf for people to buy. My sister has type I diabetes and so needs insulin injections. Each box seemed quite inexpensive as I recall, otherwise they would not be out in the open on the shelf for people to grab while shopping. Then one day they disappeared.
You see the illegal drug abusers were buying these same syringes for their habit and we can't have that, apparently. The "people who know best" in government required people to have a physician's note to buy syringes now. So the drug abusers were saving needles, sharing them, and getting infections from it. HIV spread quickly about this time. So, what does the "people who know best" do? They set up needle exchanges, if you bring in a dirty needle then they give you a clean one. Or some government funded project just hands out needles to anyone that asked for one. You see, we can't seem to stop people using the drugs and so we treat this new health problem by giving the drug abusers clean needles.
Here's an idea, let's go back to selling sterile single use needles by the gross like we did decades ago. That way we aren't expending unnecessary resources in both keeping the drug abusers from getting the needles while also spending government money handing them out. It's probably cheaper to give them away than have to deal with people stealing them from hospitals and clinics. If we make it legal again to just SELL them then people can make money on this.
A gross of needles might sound like a lot at first but for a diabetic that needs 4 injections per day that's a one month supply. This is far safer than re-using needles, and given the prevalence of the practice not so long ago I'd assume it's also quite inexpensive.
Stupid drug laws created this problem with syringes, let's do away with them all. We'd all be healthier for it. It's that or we keep giving out needles instead of just letting the drug abusers buy them like they used to.
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maybe there will be instructions to take it on an empty stomach? I'm sure it could be used for other inject able drugs besides insulin
I can see how this might be beneficial for those who are afraid of needles... But Idk how it will be possible considering pills will take time to process.