New ‘Microneedle Pill’ Could Replace Syringes For Injectable Medications

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What’s more appealing: getting a shot, or swallowing a pill full of needles? The lesser of those two evils may seem obvious, but a new invention may soon cause you to second-guess that preference.

28-year-old Carl Schoellhammer, a chemical engineering graduate student at MIT, doesn’t have a high opinion of shots. “They’re horrible, they’re painful, and nobody likes them,” he said over the phone. They also pose a major civic problem: medication non-adherence causes $100 billion in excess hospitalizations per year, and at least some of that can be attributed to drugs delivered via needle. “Many patients don’t do it,” he explains. “It could be laziness, it could be they feel better so they stop taking their medication, but certainly a dislike of needles is a big [factor].”

For his graduate research, Schoellhammer decided to do something about it — and on Tuesday, he won a $15,000 Lemelson-MIT National Collegiate Student Prize for his solution. “The [Lemelson-MIT] program was really instrumental in encouraging me,” he said. “I had that in the back of my mind in addition to my desire to get something into the clinic one day.”

 

Carl Schoellhammer shows the mPill, which can inject drugs from the inside. (Image via Lemelson-MIT Program)

 

The Microneedle Pill (or mPill), is simply a capsule covered in tiny needles and coated in a “pH responsive coating” that makes it easier to swallow. This isn’t just for kicks: Schoellhammer wants the pills to replace traditional injections, not the aspirin in your medicine cabinet. Many injectable medications, particularly biologics, are made from proteins that, if taken in pill form, would be broken down by the digestive system before they made it to the bloodstream.

Schoellhammer urges people to think of the mPill as “injections from the inside.” The stainless-steel, needle-spiked capsule is filled with the desired medication in the needed dose. Once the patient swallows it and the pill arrives in the gut, its protective coating dissolves and allows the hollow needles to poke around, delivering the medication directly to the bloodstream with much less pain and ick-factor than a traditional shot — if you don’t think too hard about it.

Plenty of safety precautions have been taken: the needles are tiny, and Schoellhammer assures skeptics that even things not intended for ingestion, like glass or staples, pass through the system safely 90%-95% of the time. The mPill has been in tests on animals (researchers used insulin as the drug since its effects are easy to measure), with success in both safety and results.

If that’s still too scary, there’s another version in development that uses solid needles made of sugar infused with the drug. The end result is the same — needle pokes digestive lining, delivering the drug directly to the bloodstream — with the added bonus that the needle itself also dissolves, leaving only the pill’s no-longer-prickly capsule in its wake.

Schoellhammer has only built one version of the pill so far. He plans to create subsequent models that improve on the original, but, he says, “there’s no technological hurdles. It’s a little capsule with little needles sticking on the outside.”

Schoellhammer isn’t just focused on the mPill: he has also invented a probe that delivers medicine directly into the gastrointestinal tracts of patients with irritable bowel disease using ultrasound. The invention reached the finals of MIT’s prestigious $100K pitch competition and was a factor in Schoellhammer’s Lemelson-MIT award.

But it’s the mPill that’s catching industry’s eye. A few pharmaceutical companies have expressed interest in further developing the mPill, but Schoellhammer isn’t yet at liberty to divulge which ones. Still, he allows a few examples of drugs that could see a great benefit from this new method of delivery: Humira, AbbVie’s rheumatoid arthritis drug, is one. Growth hormones are another.

Schoellhammer is aiming for drugs that need to be taken regularly, since those are the medications that could show the most benefit from an easier delivery system. In the meantime, the rest of us will just keep having to get tetanus boosters the old-fashioned way.

Source: Forbes