Doctors have been using needles as a way to inject people with drugs since the 1600s. Today they’re often used for biologic drugs, which are too large to deliver via pills because they would be dissolved by stomach acid.
Now a group of bioengineers is hoping to give drug delivery an update with a device that draws inspiration from cuttlefish and other sea creatures.
The blueberry-sized device can be swallowed to deliver orally drugs that would normally have to be injected through a needle. It then uses jets, modeled after the organs cephalopods use to propel themselves through the water and to release ink, to eject drugs into the tissue lining the digestive tract. The researchers report in Nature today a series of experiments that serve as a proof of concept, showing that the device was more efficient at delivering drugs than other methods of delivering drugs orally.
“When we want to deliver drugs, we have to bring real, full innovation and creativity to the table, and that’s exactly what this team has shown,” said Samir Mitragotri, a bioengineer at Harvard University who was not part of the new study. “I’m very excited about the doors this opens up both for research as well as clinical care.”
Getting drugs into the bloodstream can be a struggle because the body is trying to keep foreign chemicals out. Drugmakers face a tradeoff in deciding how to deliver drugs, weighing convenience against efficiency.
One highly effective option is an IV, which can make sure nearly 100% of a drug makes it into the bloodstream but requires a trained clinician and can be time-consuming.
Pills and other methods that can deliver drugs orally are more convenient, but less of the drug makes it into the bloodstream. The goal of the new device is to combine the convenience of oral drug delivery with the efficiency of getting a drug into deeper tissues.
“We want to make it easier for patients to receive medication,” said Giovanni Traverso, a gastroenterologist and engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brigham & Women’s Hospital who led the study. “The challenge with drugs like insulin and monoclonal antibodies is that they require an injection. That in and of itself can be a barrier for receiving that medication.”
Traverso and his colleagues created two versions of the device, one that can be swallowed like a pill and a tethered version that can be used to target specific areas in the body. Both rely on jets to spray a drug into the submucosal layer of tissue, where it is absorbed into the bloodstream. Like cephalopods, the device can jet out solution straight down and to the side, which allows it to efficiently deliver drugs in different parts of the digestive tract.
The team tested the device on a pig, using GLP-1 drugs and small interfering RNA, and were able to consistently make more than 10% of the drug bioavailable, or usable by the body — an order of magnitude more than current methods of oral drug use.
While the study is promising, it needs further testing to better understand the pool of drugs this method could work for, as well as human trials to know whether it will work as efficiently in people, too.
“What happens if you keep taking these pills for one year, three years, five years, that’s something that I think obviously wasn’t studied as part of this work, because I think they were trying to demonstrate that this concept works,” says Omid Veiseh, a bioengineer at Rice University who was not part of the study. But, he said, “this is a great new avenue of research.”