(Photo : Felice Frankel, MIT Website )

If you or someone close to you has diabetes, then you know the struggles of having to take insulin via injection on a regular basis, not to mention the discomfort and pain.

Despite the drawbacks, drug injections are one of the most effective forms of drug delivery because they provide good absorption by the body to allow the rapid onset of the drug's effects. And while oral drug administration is often preferred, these have to be broken down in the gut before being absorbed, slowly and unpredictably, limiting their effectiveness.

Medical researchers and scientists have been looking for ways to combine the best of both worlds: the ease of oral dosages with the effectiveness of injected drug delivery.

One promising possibility is a new capsule design currently being developed by researchers from MIT and Novo Nordisk, published recently in Nature Medicine, called the "luminal unfolding microneedle injector" or LUMI for short. It's a capsule that, when taken orally, unfolds the dissolvable drug microneedles loaded inside into intestinal tissue. Tested on human and swine tissue, the capsule demonstrates a new way to deliver drugs that is both simple to use and effective.

Inside the LUMI capsule are three arms that are coated with tiny microneedles, 1mm long, loaded with the intended drug (insulin was used in the study). After surviving the harsh environment of the stomach and once in place in the intestinal tract, the LUMI capsule's coating dissolves to unfold its arms, releasing the drug into the tissue for around 10 minutes, giving enough time for the microneedles to dissolve. After administering the drug, the arms dissolve over a period of 24 hours. The rest of the device then passes through the rest of the digestive system and is excreted.

The capsule uses FDA-approved drug administration technology called osmotic-controlled release oral delivery systems (OROS), which reported only one obstruction in 37.7 million distributions. Less than 9mm in diameter and 15mm in length when unfolded in the small intestine, the LUMI capsule does not block the intestinal tract and allows other contents to pass through. Several tests were also done to ensure the safety of the device when placed in action. Trials performed on swine found no evaluable abnormalities, like small holes called perforations, in the tract after the devices were used. Compared to conventional subcutaneous injections (applied under the skin), the LUMI capsule has over 10% higher bio-availability, meaning more of the drug enters the body's circulation to create an active effect over a four-hour period.

While the study focused on using the LUMI capsule for insulin delivery, it's highly possible to adapt the system to other types of drugs such as vaccines, hormones, and other types of therapeutics, especially those without oral formulations. As development continues, the LUMI system provides a new drug delivery tool that shows promise for widescale adoption.