Ingestible drug-delivery materials may help patients comply with treatment regimens
Around half of all medications for chronic diseases are not taken as prescribed, costing the U.S. health care system more than $100 billion in avoidable hospital stays each year. This noncompliance is even more significant in the developing world, where health care budgets are chronically overstretched and patients treated for diseases such as malaria must take multiple drugs with complex dose regimens. To help ensure patients receive their full course of treatment, researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a new set of drug delivery materials, which can reside in the stomach for up to nine days, slowly releasing their dosage of medication. The materials, which the researchers describe in a paper published today in the journal Nature Communications, are known as triggerable tough hydrogels (TTH), according to Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “One of...