Researchers from a university in the US have led the way for diabetics and cancer patients to manage their ailments using pills instead of needles and injections.
Some medicines for these diseases dissolve in water, making them impossible to move through the intestines, which process food and drink. As a result, these drugs cannot be taken by mouth.
But researchers at the University of California at Riverside have developed a chemical “tag” that can be attached to these drugs, allowing them to enter the bloodstream through the intestines.
A small peptide, which resembles a protein fragment, forms the tag. “Because they are relatively small molecules, you can chemically bind them to pharmaceuticals, or other molecules of interest, and use those to deliver drugs orally,” said UCR chemistry professor Min Xue. Said, who led the research.
“We didn’t expect this peptide to make its way into cells. It took us by surprise,” Xu said. “We’ve always wanted to find this kind of chemical tag, and eventually it happened all of a sudden.”
According to Xu, the discovery surprised the researchers, because they previously thought that in order for such a delivery tag to be accepted into negatively charged cells, it needed to be positively charged. His research with the neutral peptide tag EPP6 refutes that notion.
Xue’s group collaborated with Kai Chen’s group at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California to test the peptide’s ability to move through the body by administering it to rats. The team documented how the peptide eventually made its way through the blood to the animal’s organs using PET scans, a method similar to whole-body X-rays available at USC.
The team now intends to show that the tag can accomplish the same thing when attached to different drugs, after proving that the tag has successfully crossed communication systems via oral delivery. The preliminary findings which are ‘very compelling’ give us hope that we can pursue this, Xu said.
Many drugs, such as insulin, require injections. The scientists are hopeful that their upcoming series of tests will reverse this situation and enable them to attach this tag to a wide range of drugs and chemicals, changing the way those molecules flow through the body.
“This discovery may lift the burden on people who are already burdened with disease,” Xu said.
This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.
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