Injections for diabetes, cancer could become unnecessary
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside are working on new ways to help patients manage their diabetes or cancer without needles or injections.
Some medicines dissolve in water so they can pass through your digestive system, but transport through the intestinal walls is not possible.
This makes the drug less effective, as it cannot be administered by mouth.
However, UCR researchers have developed a chemical tag that can be added to the drug, which allows the drug to enter blood circulation via the intestines.
The drug-like tag is composed of a small peptide molecule that's similar to a protein.
In a laboratory experiment, researchers observed that this peptide makes its way into cells. They were testing something unrelated when they made this discovery.
There are so many ways to make it happen, whether it was luck or chance, or maybe a very clever and creative scientist got this lucky.
This observation was unexpected, the researchers said, because previously they believed that this type of delivery tag needed to carry positive charges to be accepted into the negatively charged cells.
A recent study with this peptide tag, called EPP6, shows that belief is not accurate.
Scientists at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California have tested a peptide to see if it can move through the body.
The researchers used a PET scan, which is similar to an X-ray and can be done at USC, to observe the peptide accumulating in the intestines and then document its ultimate transfer into the animals' organs via the blood.
With promising preliminary results proving the tag could successfully navigate the circulatory systems through oral administration, the team now wants to test it on a range of drugs.
With promising preliminary results proving the tag could successfully navigate the circulatory systems through oral administration, the team now wants to test it on a range of drugs.
"The results are quite compelling and make us think we can push this further,"
Injections of many drugs, including insulin, need to be given. Researchers hope this work will allow their next set of experiments to change the way these molecules move through the body.