Researchers develop innovative capsule for drug delivery over weeks

A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brigham and Women's Hospital have developed an innovative star-shaped capsule that might help save lives.

People do not like taking medication, even seem to willfully forget when doctors prescribe repeated doses, which made treating diseases like malaria and Alzheimer's complicated. Also inconvenience and memory lapses worked against strict dosing regimens. Doctors and patients therefore needed a delivery method that was safe and effective, so people could just swallow and forget.

To this end, a team led by Dr Giogvanni Traverso and Dr Robert Langer developed a long-term drug delivery capsule that sat in the stomach, and slowly released   medication for up to two weeks. The innovative star-shaped design could be folded into a capsule to hold weeks, or even a month's worth of medication in its six limbs.

''The team attempted many approaches and tested a range of shapes including the star and hexagon shown in our paper in Science Translational Medicine,'' Traverso told Digital Trends. ''The optimal shape and configuration of the dosage form was selected based on its performance based on ease of encapsulation, manufacturability, gastric stability and drug release properties."

The team tested the capsule using both mathematical modelling and animal models to investigate the effects of delivering a sustained therapeutic dose of a drug called ivermectin, used in the treatment of parasitic infections such as river blindness. Ivermectin came with an added bonus of helping keep malaria-carrying mosquito populations at bay. 

The team found that in large animal models, the capsule safely stayed in the stomach, and slowly released the medication for 14 days, and potentially providing a new way to combat malaria and other infectious diseases. 

The results of this work were published on 16 November in Science Translational Medicine.