What are the squid-inspired pills that can replace injections?

Getting jabs can be a fearsome experience for some people. Those who have to inject needles daily to receive insulin or for cancer treatments cannot avoid it and have to bear the discomfort.

But researchers have developed a method which could become an alternative to these injections for delivering drugs. They have come up with ingestible capsules, inspired by cephalopods like squids and cuttlefish, that release a burst of drugs directly inside the stomach and other parts of the digestive system.

We will take a look.

Squid-like pills to deliver drugs

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk took inspiration from squids to develop these ingestible capsules.

The study, published in the journal Nature last week, said that these devices used jets, modelled after the cephalopods that regulate the pressure and direction to shoot jets of ink. These capsules use squid-like jets to “spray” the drug into tissue, as per the Singularity Hub report.

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The researchers used this idea to distribute drugs in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. By shooting the medication directly into the gut, researchers ensured that more drug is absorbed before it was broken down by the body, the report noted.

Researchers say “these innovative devices deliver drugs directly” into the gut without needles. They created two mechanisms for these devices to mimic the jetting action of squids and octopi.

One is fuelled by coiled springs and the other by compressed carbon dioxide.

Researchers used “compressed carbon dioxide or tightly coiled springs to generate the force needed to propel liquid drugs out of the capsule. The gas or spring is kept in a compressed state by a carbohydrate trigger, which is designed to dissolve when exposed to humidity or an acidic environment such as the stomach. When the trigger dissolves, the gas or spring is allowed to expand, propelling a jet of drugs out of the capsule,” according to the MIT News report.

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Researchers also designed the pills to target different parts of the digestive tract. One works for larger organs, such as the stomach and colon, while the other is for smaller organs like the oesophagus and small intestine.

Why it is significant

Jabs are needed to administer hormones like insulin , vaccines, or antibodies. Injections are used instead of pills as once swallowed, large molecules are generally destroyed in the digestive tract, restricting their efficacy, noted Singularity Hub.

In simpler terms, while pills can deliver drugs orally, less of the medication reaches the bloodstream, according to STAT News.

This new device will help in delivering the drug orally and more conveniently into deeper tissues.

“When we want to deliver drugs, we have to bring real, full innovation and creativity to the table, and that’s exactly what this team has shown,” Samir Mitragotri, a bioengineer at Harvard University who was not part of the new study, told STAT News. “I’m very excited about the doors this opens up both for research as well as clinical care.”

These capsules, made of metal and plastic, were tested on dogs and pigs. Researchers showed they can use these pills to deliver insulin, GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic , and RNA-based molecules.

“In contrast to a small needle, which needs to have intimate contact with the tissue, our experiments indicated that a jet may be able to deliver most of the dose from a distance or at a slight angle,” study author Graham Arrick said in a press release.

Omid Veiseh, a professor of bioengineering at United States’ Rice University, who was not involved in the study, told MIT News that these pills are “a significant leap forward in oral drug delivery of macromolecule drugs… While many approaches for oral drug delivery have been attempted in the past, they tend to be poorly efficient in achieving high bioavailability [a drug’s ability to be absorbed and used by the body]. Here, the researchers demonstrate the ability to deliver bioavailability in animal models with high efficiency.”

It is hard to say when needle-free drug delivery will become a reality. For now, more testing is required and human trials need to be conducted to determine the efficacy of these capsules on people.

Speaking to STAT News, Veiseh said the study is a “great new avenue of research”. However, he added, “What happens if you keep taking these pills for one year, three years, five years, that’s something that I think obviously wasn’t studied as part of this work, because I think they were trying to demonstrate that this concept works”.

With inputs from agencies