Forgot your meds? Hub scientists have your back
A simple capsule that slowly releases medication over several days could eventually ease the burden for people with illnesses like diabetes and heart disease that require longterm medical treatments, Hub researchers say.
“A lot of people do not take their medication as prescribed,” said Jinyao Liu, a drug delivery post-doctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “With this, you just need a single dose.”
Up to 50 percent of people do not properly adhere to their regimens, which costs the country an estimated $300 billion in wasted costs each year.
The capsules, developed by Liu and his colleagues, were tested on pigs and managed to stay intact over a nine-day period, according to a paper published today in the journal Nature Communications.
The material is partially made out of a hydrogel that expands when exposed to liquid — giving it the ability to grow from the size of a peanut to that of a golf ball once it hits the stomach, ensuring it does not pass through the body. Additional materials were added, including one derived from seaweed, to make the pill tough enough to withstand movement and acid in the stomach.
The end product could not even be cut with a razor blade, researchers found.
“People have tried the hydrogel before for this, but it’s very weak and can be dissolved easily by the gastric pressure,” Liu said. “So for the first time we used a tough hydrogel.”
Pigs were used to test the material because their stomachs are comparable in size to those of humans, said Dr. Giovanni Traverso, a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who helped create the material.
“We monitored them in the stomachs of pigs for a couple of weeks, and they were eating food from banana peels to raw potatoes,” Traverso said. “After over a week, (the capsule) started to break up.”
Further research is needed to perfect the rate of drug release, and to test the capsules for other applications, including weight loss.
For now, the method is geared toward serving patients who suffer from conditions that come with behavioral or memory issues, like various psychiatric illnesses and Alzheimer’s disease.
“There’s certainly populations where the disease impairs ability to take medication,” Traverso said. “There’s a tremendous amount we can do to make that easier.”