You know what’s the worst part about being sick?
I mean besides the aches and chills and stuffy nose?
Taking medicine.
Seriously, a spoonful of sugar doesn’t do anything.
Why isn’t there a better way to take medicine?
Hey everyone Julia here for DNews
But what if there was a way to deliver drugs into your body, molecule by molecule.
Well, scientists are working on it.
A new device, created by a team in Sweden could inject medicine directly into the spine
using just 1% of the dose typical drug delivery methods use.
The device works like an ion pump, which sends out the medicine one molecule at a time.
The research, published in the journal Science, reduced pain in rats by releasing GABA, a
pain-reducing chemical the body naturally produces, directly into the spine.
While the technology is still at least five to ten years away for use in humans, it has
the potential to change the way we take medicine.
A lot of our current drug-delivery strategies have been around since ancient times.
People in ancient cultures soaked herbs in water making tea, others inhale smoke particles
from the burning of medicinal plants.
Ancient Persian practitioners sniffed or snuffed medicine directly into the nose.
The nose is filled with blood vessels, covered by only a thin membrane, so it’s an easy
place to get drugs into the bloodstream.
A method we still use today, from decongestants to vaccines, nasal delivery is quick and easy.
Pills are pretty ancient too.
The first pill poppers date back to Ancient Egypt, where plants, ground into powders were
mixed with honey, clay, or dough or other things then rolled into little balls.
Ancient romans made long strings of clay which they chopped up into little discs, like making
cookies with a cookie cutter.
Some form of pill making like this existed for centuries.
Then in the 1800s, pills became coated in sugar or gelatin.
In 1834 a French drug manufacturer invented the soft gel pill, where gelatin molds are
injected with oils or medicine dissolved in oils.
Then a few years later in 1847, an English drug manufacturer James Murdock invented the
two piece capsule, which is filled with powder or pellets.
You know those 24 hour pills, or time-release pills?
They were developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and use the GI tract to release
a drug over time.
Basically the pills are covered what’s called an enteric coating, that dissolves only under
certain acidic conditions..
And different places in your GI tract have different acidity levels, so as the pill moves
through your guts, it releases doses depending on the different levels.
So it might be able to get through the highly acidic stomach, but dissolves in the less
acidic small intestine.
Controlled delivery systems like implants started to hit the scene in the past few decades.
These devices can deliver doses of medicine for a really long time, like over the course
of a few years.
The most popular of these include some forms of birth control like the IUD or the implant
that goes in your arm.
The Norplant® system, the one that goes in your arm, was introduced in the 1980s.
It works because the hormone is wrapped in silicone capsules.
And it takes awhile for the hormone to slowly diffuse through the silicone coating, like
three years.
But because the silicone doesn’t biodegrade in the body, it has to be taken out when it’s
finished.
And those advances were really within the last 30 years.
I can’t wait to see the medicine of the future.
But for now, it seems the best way to get your medicine, is to take a chill pill.
Do you ever have trouble taking your pills?
Joe Bereta shows you the best way to swallow them, in this video.
What’s your favorite way to take medicine?
or least favorite, cough syrup.. yuck.
Let us know down in the comments.
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