Microneedle pill takes the sting out of insulin
For almost a century, patients with diabetes have relied on injectable insulin to manage their condition. And for nearly as long, researchers have pursued a way to orally administer insulin. While insulin injections can be lifesaving, they are unpleasant, cumbersome, and increasingly expensive for patients, so health care providers often delay prescribing insulin injections in favor of less-effective oral medications. A team of investigators from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, MIT, and Novo Nordisk has pioneered a new approach that brings closer to the clinic an oral formulation of insulin that can be swallowed rather than injected. With funding and in collaboration with scientists from Novo Nordisk, the team has developed an ingestible microneedle that can inject insulin into the stomach lining in a large animal model. Results are published in Science. “The work described builds and is motivated by a few critical clinical observations, including, when a drug is injected into the...