Swallow the syringe
A "smart capsule" is presented that makes painless injections from inside the intestine
Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science
No one likes injections, but for some patients they turn almost into a real hard labor. For example, patients with type I diabetes are sometimes forced to inject insulin several times a day. Therefore, the developers do not give up trying to create a more "humane" replacement for needles and syringes. A new such project was presented by the famous inventor of medical instruments Mir Imran, creator of the implantable defibrillator. According to IEEE Spectrum, the prototype of the device has already been successfully tested on humans.
Imran's team spent more than seven years developing the RaniPill smart capsule. The miniature device is swallowed, and its shells dissolve already in the acidic environment of the stomach. This leads to the mixing of two chemicals in a special micro-capacity and the release of a small amount of carbon dioxide. The gas inflates a tiny elastic sphere like a balloon, and under its pressure, needles are pushed out of the capsule, injecting the drug directly into the intestinal wall.
It does not contain pain receptors, but it is densely permeated with a network of vessels, where the medicine immediately gets. Meanwhile, the remaining parts of the capsule are dissolved, including needles made of a biodegradable polymer, and individual fragments come out later along with digested food. The developers have demonstrated that the use of RaniPill does not cause problems when swallowing, passing through the digestive tract, and even when inflating the "ball" and triggering needles.
Diagram of the RaniPill device
Tests were conducted with about a hundred experimental animals and various potentially useful drugs, including insulin. Tests on 20 people were also successfully completed, although in this case Imran's team has so far dispensed with drugs, only checking the volunteers' feelings from using the "smart capsule". They really didn't feel any pain from such a hidden injection.
At the next stage, trials will be conducted with real patients and real medicines. The inventors themselves plan to supplement their "smart capsule" with a small wireless sensor that will signal as soon as the medicine is delivered to the target.
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