Researchers at MIT and Brigham & Women’s Hospital have designed a hydrogel that can be swallowed and will stay in the stomach for several days as it delivers drugs.
At present, patients don’t always take their medication as prescribed. In fact, this non-compliance costs the health-care system in the U.S. over $100 billion annually in avoidable hospital stays. There is a need for simple-to-take formulations that can deliver drugs over a sustained period, so that patients don’t need to remember to take medicine regularly. This is vitally important in the developing world, where people need to take multiple drugs in complex regimens to treat diseases like malaria.
In this study, which was recently published in Nature Communications, researchers designed tough hydrogels that can be loaded with a drug. When hydrated, the hydrogels exist as a tough Jell-o-like material. When dehydrated, they are small enough to be swallowed comfortably. However, upon absorbing fluid in the stomach they swell, becoming too large to pass through the stomach into the intestine. The result is that the gels reside in the stomach for up to 9 days, and release a drug in a sustained way before passing through the body harmlessly.
To withstand the compression forces in the stomach, the hydrogels are really tough. They are made using two polymer networks: “One is composed of alginate, a material derived from seaweed, and the other is polyacrylamide, a widely-used polymer,” says Giovanni Traverso, a biomedical engineer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Patients can also take an antidote, which will break down the gel really quickly if they have a bad reaction to it.
Study in Nature Communications: Triggerable tough hydrogels for gastric resident dosage forms…
Via: MIT…
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