Tech Update: Microneedle Pill May Be Alternative to Shots

A new pill may provide a safe and effective alternative to painful injections. What’s the catch? It’s covered in tiny needles.

Although swallowing a pill covered in microneedles might sound painful, the researchers who developed the novel capsule design say it could deliver drugs safely, without any harmful side effects, and without any pain. That’s because there aren’t any pain receptors in the gastrointestinal tract.
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“This could be a way that the patient can circumvent the need to have an infusion or subcutaneous administration of a drug,” study co-author Giovanni Traverso said in a news release.

A research fellow at MIT and gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Traverso and his colleagues tested their microneedle pill in the gastrointestinal tracts of pigs. The results of their study appear in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

While patients and physicians tend to prefer a pill over an injection, some drugs just can’t be delivered that way—especially those made from large proteins, such as biologics used to treat cancer, arthritis, and Crohn’s disease, as well as vaccines, recombinant DNA, and RNA.  

“The large size of these biologic drugs makes them nonabsorbable,” study co-author Carl Schoellhammer, a graduate student in chemical engineering at MIT, said in a news release. “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.”

With these challenges in mind, the team wanted to design a capsule that could deliver a wide range of drugs, prevent degradation, and inject the medicine directly into the gastrointestinal tract. Their acrylic capsule prototype measures 2 cm long by 1 cm in diameter, is coated with hollow, stainless steel needles about 5 mm long, and includes a reservoir for the drug.

The researchers tested the pill with insulin in pigs and found it delivered the drug more quickly and efficiently than a subcutaneous injection—without any traces of tissue damage. It took the capsules more than a week to pass through the entire gastrointestinal tract, but the microneedles successfully injected insulin into the stomach lining, small intestine, and colon.

The researchers plan to tweak the design to further improve drug delivery and absorbency. Though they used insulin for the study, they say they envision their capsule being used to deliver biologics and vaccines to humans.

“The kinetics are much better, and much faster-onset, than those seen with traditional under-the-skin administration,” Traverso said. “For molecules that are particularly difficult to absorb, this would be a way of actually administering them at much higher efficiency.”

—Colleen Mullarkey

Reference

Traverso G, Schoellhammer CM, Schroeder A, Maa R, Lauwers GY, Polat BE, et al. Microneedles for drug delivery via the gastrointestinal tract. J Pharm Sci. 2014 Sep 22. [Epub ahead of print].