A new form of oral insulin, which may soon be tested in humans, can be taken as an alternative to syringes or insulin pumps.
ADVERTISEMENTScientists have developed a way to provide insulin orally, via a capsule or sugar-free chocolate, and successfully tested it on animals.
This new insulin will be ready for human testing in 2025.
Roughly 61 million people have diabetes in Europe and between 5 and 10 per cent of them have type 1 diabetes, meaning that they need to take insulin daily to control their blood glucose levels.
Some people with the more common type 2 diabetes also need to take insulin. The three most common ways to take insulin are with a syringe, an insulin pen, or an insulin pump, according to the International Diabetes Federation.
Delivering medicine to the liver
Researchers from the University of Sydney in Australia in collaboration with the Arctic University of Norway had previously discovered it was possible to deliver medicines to the liver with nano-carriers.
"We were successful in getting a grant in Australia, to look at different methods to deliver those therapeutics, to those cells within an ageing population," Dr Nicholas Hunt, senior lecturer at the University of Sydney told Euronews Health.
"And that involved the use of nanomedicines. So, we started off using quantum dots, which were actually incredibly cool and amazing materials," he added.
Quantum dots are tiny semiconductor particles with dimensions on the order of a few nanometres.
"When we first used them, we saw that we could deliver drugs very efficiently. You could precisely control which part of the body they were going to. It didn't have off-target effects, and was really focused and effective," Hunt said.
The idea of creating an oral form of insulin came after a geriatric doctor in a clinic the researchers work with expressed concern about elderly individuals who were hospitalised, increasing their risk of secondary infections, since they needed insulin injections.
"Of course, it was just a concept back then. And then the key steps we went through after that, was to firstly validate you could actually deliver insulin, orally," said Hunt.
The team had to develop a specialised polymer designed to navigate the stomach and be absorbed in the gut, then eventually reach the liver.
They set out to design a polymer that responded to a patient’s blood sugar levels, which they did by looking at enzymes that break down long sugar molecules.
"If there's a high amount of blood glucose, there's a high amount of those enzymes, and then they degrade the polymer and then release the insulin," Hunt said.
Then the nanomaterial can be cleared out rapidly by the body.
“This way of taking insulin is more precise because it delivers the insulin rapidly to the areas of the body that need it most. When you take insulin with a syringe, it is spread throughout the body where it can cause unwanted side effects,” Peter McCourt at UiT - the Arctic University of Norway said in a statement.
Plans for future clinical trials
This system was tested on mice, rats and baboons and the team published its findings in Nature Nanotechnology.
Baboons did not want to take a tablet so the researchers tried sugar-free jellies and sugar-free chocolate, with the baboons preferring the lab-created chocolate.
ADVERTISEMENT"When we did our baboon study, we did it in a way where it's designed to mimic what would be done in the phase I clinical trial. So it's the same dosage of insulin that would be used, the same experimental paradigm," said Hunt.
The focus is currently on manufacturing for the upcoming clinical trial with the hopes of starting by the end of the year.
Hunt says they hope to carry out subsequent trials in 2026, which if successful, could mean seeking approval from regulators in 2028 at the earliest.
"We kind of hope that a therapeutic that they can take orally and something that they can't overdose on…can allow for better control of glucose throughout the whole life cycle," said Hunt, adding that the ingestible insulin didn’t need to be refrigerated and was still cost-effective.
