In future, diabetes patients can
swallow their medicines instead of taking insulin shots.
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This could be achieved by innovative design of small pills that could deliver drugs to the gut.
RoboCap, a robotic capsule that can burrow past mucus inside the intestine to deliver grugs.
These devices could help in easy absorption of drugs and also an effective alternative for injection based medicines.
The pill includes a mini-motor that can power the device to spin around.
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The spinning of the capsule regulates twisting and turning through the mucus layers in the small intestine.
After 30 minutes of twists and turns, the pill passes through the system.
The makers of this pill tested it with vancomycin, a pill used to treat bacterial infection and insulin in pigs.
The RoboCap robotic capsule was able to deliver 20 to 40 times better bioavailability and how well the body absorbs the drugs.
They also found that RoboCap capsule was able to spread the drugs over a larger surface area in the gut than the control methods.