Patches and robotic pills may one day replace injections

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Do you hate getting shots? If so, you’re not alone — and you may be in luck. Researchers are devising new, pain-free ways to deliver drugs. One is a robotic pill. Another is a medicine patch worn on the skin. Both are still in the early stages of development. But someday, these innovations could make delivering medicines more patient-friendly.

The new robotic pill comes out of a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. It holds a teeny, spring-loaded microneedle only about 3 millimeters (a tenth of an inch) long. Once swallowed, the pill injects medicine directly through the stomach wall.

Unlike a normal shot, this needle prick shouldn’t hurt, says Giovanni Traverso. He’s a physician and biomedical engineer who specializes in the gut. He also helped develop the robo-pill at MIT. Stomachs can detectsome sensations, such as the deep ache of a stomach ulcer. Or the discomfort of feeling bloated. But those sensations are “more related to stretch receptors,” Traverso explains. The stomach lacks receptors to detect sharp pains, such as an injection.

Designing a pill that could reliably prick the stomach wall was a bit tricky. Once swallowed, the small but heavy device settles to the bottom of the stomach. In order to prick the stomach wall beneath it, the pill must land injector-side-down. To make that happen, the MIT team borrowed an idea from the leopard tortoise.

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