Washington: A team including an Indian origin scientist has created a pill form of insulin treatment, so diabetes patients would be spared the pain of jabbing themselves with a needle every day.
Sanyog Jain, assistant professor at National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, and colleagues explain that patients with diabetes sometimes skip doses or stop taking their insulin because the injections can be painful. But doing so puts their health in danger.
For years, researchers have sought a way to transform delivery of this therapy from a shot to a pill, but it has been a challenge. The body's digestive enzymes that are so good at breaking down food also break down insulin before it can get to work.
In addition, insulin doesn't get easily absorbed through the gut into the bloodstream. To overcome these hurdles, Jain's team combined two approaches to shield insulin from the digestive enzymes and then get it into the blood.
They packaged insulin in tiny sacs made of lipids, or fats, called liposomes, which are already used in some treatments. Then, they wrapped the liposomes in layers of protective molecules called polyelectrolytes.
To help these "layersomes" get absorbed into the bloodstream, they attached folic acid, a kind of vitamin B that has been shown to help transport liposomes across the intestinal wall into the blood.
In rats, the delivery system lowered blood glucose levels almost as much as injected insulin, though the effects of the layersomes lasted longer than that of injected insulin.
The study is published in the journal Biomacromolecules.
