MOSCOW, October 1 (RIA Novosti) - Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have designed drug capsules that could replace injections.
"This could be a way that the patient can circumvent the need to have an infusion or subcutaneous administration of a drug," Giovanni Traverso, a researcher from MIT, said in the statement published on the university's website Wednesday.
To assess the usefulness of drug capsules, the researchers first tested them with insulin on pigs, with no tissue damage identified.
"The large size of these biologic drugs makes them nonabsorbable. And before they even would be absorbed, they're degraded in your GI tract by acids and enzymes that just eat up the molecules and make them inactive," said Carl Schoellhammer, a graduate student in MIT's chemical engineering division. "
However, the researchers responsible for the project expect that drug capsules would be most useful in the case of biopharmaceuticals, such as antibodies used to treat cancer and autoimmune disorders like arthritis and Crohn's disease.
