Insulin pill ‘breakthrough’ a ‘game changer’ for diabetes

Needle haters, rejoice.

Researchers in Canada are developing oral insulin tablets which would replace the necessity of daily injections for patients in need, according to Eurekalert.org.

The “game-changing discovery” from the University of British Columbia has been successfully tested on rats — ones who absorbed insulin from the oral tablets in the same way they did when injected.

“These exciting results show that we are on the right track in developing an insulin formulation that will no longer need to be injected before every meal, improving the quality of life, as well as mental health, of more than 9 million Type 1 diabetics around the world,” said principal investigator and professor Dr. Anubhav Pratap-Singh.

Pratap-Singh added that the oral form could also prove to be significantly more cost efficient than traditional injections.

Unlike most non-injected forms of insulin, this tablet is not to be swallowed but instead dissolves between a patient’s gum and cheek.

The test results are also seeing nearly 100% of insulin tabs going straight to the liver whereas previous attempts at drinkable insulin would be mostly retained in the stomach, Pratap-Singh’s senior fellow, Dr. Alberto Baldelli explained. “Similar to the rapid-acting insulin injection, our oral delivery tablet absorbs after half an hour and can last for about two to four hours long,” he added.

“Even after two hours of delivery, we did not find any insulin in the stomachs of the rats we tested. It was all in the liver and this is the ideal target for insulin — it’s really what we wanted to see,” reiterated Yigong Guo, first author of the pill study.

Along with the seamless biological delivery and prospective cost cutting, Pratap-Singh also said there could be an environmental benefit to the breakthrough.

“More than 300,000 Canadians have to inject insulin multiple times per day,” Pratap-Singh said. “That is a lot of environmental waste from the needles and plastic from the syringe that might not be recycled and go to landfill, which wouldn’t be a problem with an oral tablet.”

Though he said much more time, funding and additional collaborators are needed before human trials begin.

For Pratap-Singh, his search to ease the lives of diabetic patients came in honor of his father, a patient who has been injecting insulin three to four times a day for the past 15 years.