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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.
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
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!