Delivering insulin in a pill

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Northerner

Admin (Retired)
Relationship to Diabetes
Type 1
Given the choice of taking a pill or injecting oneself with a needle, most of us would opt to regulate a chronic health condition by swallowing a pill. But for millions of people living with type 1 diabetes, a painful needle prick once or twice daily is the only option for delivering the insulin that their bodies cannot produce on their own.

Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed an oral delivery method that could dramatically transform the way in which diabetics keep their blood sugar levels in check.

Not only does oral delivery of insulin promise to improve the quality of life for up to 40 million people with type 1 diabetes worldwide, it could also mitigate many of the disease's life-threatening side effects that result from patients failing to give themselves required injections.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180625192838.htm

That old misconception of 'painful needle pricks' yet again...🙄 For most people the needles aren't in the least bit painful as they are so short and fine these days, it's the mental gymnastics that go into calculating the dose and timing that's the real problem and harder to solve than Kepler's laws of planetary motion every blessed mealtime! 😱

My guess is it will be (at least!) 10 years off... 😉
 
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Given the choice of taking a pill or injecting oneself with a needle, most of us would opt to regulate a chronic health condition by swallowing a pill. But for millions of people living with type 1 diabetes, a painful needle prick once or twice daily is the only option for delivering the insulin that their bodies cannot produce on their own.

Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed an oral delivery method that could dramatically transform the way in which diabetics keep their blood sugar levels in check.

Not only does oral delivery of insulin promise to improve the quality of life for up to 40 million people with type 1 diabetes worldwide, it could also mitigate many of the disease's life-threatening side effects that result from patients failing to give themselves required injections.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180625192838.htm

That old misconception of 'painful needle pricks' yet again...🙄 For most people the needles aren't in the least bit painful as they are so short and fine these days, it's the mental gymnastics that go into calculating the dose and timing that's the real problem and harder to solve than Kepler's laws of planetary motion every blessed mealtime! 😱

My guess is it will be (at least!) 10 years off... 😉
If not longer.
 
That old misconception of 'painful needle pricks' yet again...🙄 For most people the needles aren't in the least bit painful as they are so short and fine these days, it's the mental gymnastics that go into calculating the dose and timing that's the real problem and harder to solve than Kepler's laws of planetary motion every blessed mealtime! 😱

My guess is it will be (at least!) 10 years off... 😉

For sure some people have a problem with the injections. I suspect blood testing is much more annoying to most of us.

Also, what's with the "once or twice daily"? Or The Guardian's "typically between two and four times a day"? Those don't match current NICE recommendations for typical patients (recommendation is for MDI, so one or two basal injections and a bolus for each meal, but 4 or 5 would be more of a minimum than a maximum).
 
How would the dosing work though? Depending on what my daughter is eating and what her BG is, her mealtime bolus could be 5.8 units one time, 11.6 the next, 9.2 the next, etc etc. There's no way you could get that sort of accuracy with pills, unless you want to take hundreds of them a day! It might work for basal insulin perhaps but I don't see how for boluses!
 
Would the oral insulin take longer to get into the system? Would it vary, or be affected by what else you ate?
 
It’s a good few years since injections were painful.

I take a variable dose of Creon depending on what I eat. Higher fat, more Creon. That works nicely, but those dietary enzymes aren’t absorbed, they just work in the gut. With the variability of absorption that afflicts all creonistas, and the folk who have gastroparesis, doses of oral insulin will be pure guesswork.

Even for plain Type 1s, the amount of of fat and fibre radically changes absorption and the passage of food through the intestine, so where exactly in the gut is this insulin absorbed?

Seems like a rather inexact science. Inhaled insulin should be revived and refined.
 
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