Not all medications are effective if taken in pill form. Large-molecule drugs made of peptides or proteins, such as insulin, have to be administered via injections because of this.
Researchers have long sought a better way to deliver these medications, such as patches that stick to the inside of your cheek. But according to Nature, “getting substances to stick to wet cheeks without damaging the tissues can be difficult.”
Jean-Christophe Leroux, a pharmacist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and his colleagues have found inspiration from an unlikely source, however.
An octopus.
“The suction cup in the octopus is made in such a way that you really have a very strong suction as soon as you apply it to the wet tissue,” Leroux said.
Credit: Credit: ETH Zurich
Credit: Credit: ETH Zurich
The rubber dispensers are about 1.1 centimeters across and 0.6 centimeters high, and can hold more than 50 milligrams of a drug. Their design stops the medication from being diluted by saliva or other fluids, said study co-author Zhi Luo, a materials scientist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China.
According to Nature, the researchers tested the patches in beagles, which have a cheek lining similar to humans. They loaded the cups with desmopressin — a peptide drug that is administered orally — and a chemical that makes drugs pass more easily through tissue.
The researchers found oral bioavailability — the amount of the medicine taken by mouth that reaches the bloodstream — using the suction cup was 16.4%, compared to just 0.12% with a tablet.
After three hours, the dogs who used the suction cups had a blood-plasma concentration of the drug 150 times higher than in those who took tablets.
This is an “unprecedented increase in bioavailability,” Simon Matoori, a clinical pharmacist at the University of Montreal, told Nature.
The researchers also tested the suction cups with semaglutide, which is used to treat diabetes and has molecules four times larger than desmopressin.
The patch’s bioavailability was similar to the tablet after 30 minutes.
“This clever way of overcoming biological barriers will inspire other drug-delivery scientists to improve further so that, someday, we can deliver insulin non-invasively,” Kinam Park, a pharmacist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, told Nature.
You can read the entire study in Science Translational Medicine.
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