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New insulin pill shows promise as effective diabetes therapy

Thursday, 19 November 2015 1:19 PM [ Last Update: Thursday, 19 November 2015 1:19 PM ]

A new insulin pill may in the near future help patients better manage diabetes.

American researchers have successfully tested an insulin pill that might be able to offer an effective oral option to those who suffer from diabetes.

According to the scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the new drug can provide a more effective dose and help patients who find injections uncomfortable.

"When you deliver insulin by injection, it goes first through the peripheral bloodstream and then to blood circulation in the liver," explained Samir Mitragotri of UC, Santa Barbara.

He added that oral delivery would take a more direct route.

Producing an oral medication to deliver insulin in Diabetic patients has been a major challenge for scientists because of the difficulty of getting the medication past the proteolytic environment of the stomach and intestine without destroying the protein itself.

In order to resolve the problem, scientists have introduced a combination of enteric-coated capsules and insulin-loaded mucoadhesive polymer patches to the new pill.

The combination allows the pill to survive stomach acids and deliver its payload to the small intestine, where it will release the patches that adhere to the intestinal wall and prevent proteolytic enzymes from reaching insulin. The pill will then use a permeation enhancer to deposit insulin that can pass through to the blood.

"This is the first essential step in showing that these patches can deliver insulin," Mitragotri said, adding that it must undergo additional stages of testing and improvement before it can be considered as a viable treatment for diabetes.

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