Researchers Develop Swallowable Device that Injects Insulin Painlessly by for Natural Society
For many people with diabetes, living with the disease requires multiple needle sticks a day to inject insulin and control their blood sugar. But in the future, diabetics might be able to take their insulin in pill-form. Two groups of researchers are working to make this possible in the future.
The groups, from MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, have developed an insulin delivery system that still uses a needle, but it’s so small that it can be swallowed, pain-free.
The pea-sized device contains a spring that injects a tiny dart of solid insulin into the wall of the stomach, according to Carlo Giovanni Traverso, an associate physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Traverso said:
“We chose the stomach as the site of delivery because we recognized that the stomach is a thick and robust part of the GI tract.”
Once the device reaches the stomach, the humidity there allows the spring to launch the insulin dart. If the idea makes you cringe, you can relax; it doesn’t hurt, thanks to the lack of pain receptors in the stomach. Once the injection has occurred, the needle breaks down in the digestive tract. [1] [2]
That all sounded good, in theory, but the researchers had to overcome the issue of getting the device to orient itself in such a way that it injected the insulin directly into the stomach. If you swallow a pill, you don’t have much control over which direction it lands once it’s in the body. [1]
Fortunately, nature provided the solution.
