Researchers are developing an insulin pill that could soon offer a pain-free blood sugar management option to people with diabetes. “With diabetes, there’s a need for oral delivery,” says Samir Mitragotri, professor in the chemical engineering department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who specialises in targeted drug delivery. “People take insulin several times a day and delivering it by needles is a big challenge.”
More than 29 million individuals in the United States have undiagnosed or diagnosed diabetes, according to 2014 estimates from the Centers for Disease Control.
For those who don’t like needles, the discomfort injections can pose is a huge barrier to compliance, says Amrita Banerjee, a postdoctoral researcher in Mitragotri’s lab. “It can lead to mismanagement of treatment and complications that lead to hospitalisation.”
A pill could circumvent the discomfort associated with the needle while potentially providing a more effective dose, researchers say. “When you deliver insulin by injection, it goes first through the peripheral bloodstream and then to blood circulation in the liver,” Mitragotri says. Oral delivery would take a more direct route.
While oral medications to help the body produce insulin have been around for a while, a pill that delivers insulin remains a highly sought goal of diabetes medicine. The main obstacle to its development has been getting the medication past the hostile proteolytic environment of the stomach and intestine without destroying the protein itself.
The key is a combination of enteric-coated capsules and insulin-loaded mucoadhesive polymer patches that were optimised by Banerjee. The pill has demonstrated its ability to survive stomach acids with the protection of the enteric-coated capsule and deliver its payload to the small intestine.
— Source: www.futurity.org
