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A particularly unpleasant side effect of diabetes, especially if you are afraid of needles, is the daily injection of insulin. Being able to administer insulin more easily, for example by swallowing a pill, would greatly reduce the burden of patients with the disease.
The researchers of MIT have precisely developed this objective (until here it has only been tested on animals, but it certainly is a result of 39, an exciting start). They have created a small pill, the size of a blueberry, that can be swallowed. It contains a small freeze-dried compressed insulin needle, which is released and injected into the lining of the stomach. If this sounds a bit painful, do not worry, your abdominal wall has no pain receptor.
One of the problems badociated with insulin consumption is that it is broken down by stomach acid before reaching the bloodstream. As a result, researchers had to ensure that their small insulin needles were injected only into the stomach wall and not randomly released. Then they caught an improbable animal as inspiration: the leopard tortoise .
Leopard tortoises are found in Africa and possess shells very intelligently designed. They are exceptionally tall with stiff sides, which is very useful if, for some reason, they turn around. Scientists have used computer modeling to design their own version of a self-correcting turtle shell, thus creating a capsule that can orient correctly even in the stomach.
"If a person was moving or if his stomach was making peristaltic movements, the device would not budge from its preferred orientation ," said Alex Abramson, the first author of the program. study published in the journal Science ] in a statement.
The needle is loaded by a spring. It is attached to a tiny compressed spring held in place by the sugar. When the capsule reaches the stomach, this sugar dissolves releasing the spring and the needle. When the device was tested on pigs, it took about an hour for any insulin to enter the bloodstream and cause no adverse effects.
The pill can now give the dose that a person with type 2 diabetes should normally inject, but additional research and clinical trials are needed before the capsule can be given to diabetic patients in the real world.
The insulin itself is a peptide, a short chain of amino acids, and researchers explain that its device can also be used to administer other types of peptides, such as immunosuppressive agents used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel diseases. .
"This is by far the most innovative and most impactful innovative technology revealed to date for the oral administration of peptides" observed Maria José Alonso of the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. author of the study.
"Our motivation is to enable patients to take it more easily – drugs, especially those that require injection" said lead author Giovanni Traverso.
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