Ultra-long acting oral dosage forms have been a goal for the pharma industry for years given that fewer repeat doses would improve patient compliance. But the developmental hurdles are manifold – the system has to stay stable in a capsule form for years, rapidly deploy in the gastric cavity, achieve multi-day gastric residence, release the drug in a linear fashion, and then exit safely out of the gastrointestinal tract. Not easy. But Researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital think they have mitigated these problems and developed a drug delivery system capable of safely residing in the stomach for two weeks. We asked Giovanni Traverso, senior author of the paper, and a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to tell us more.
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References
- AM Bellinger et al., “Oral, ultra–long-lasting drug delivery: Application toward malaria elimination goals”, Sci Transl Med, 8, 365 (2016).
