Taking medication at the right time and the right dose is important. However, many do not succeed in taking the prescribed medication at the prescribed time and regularly. As a result, the drugs often do not work properly. For such failures, there is now prevention in the form of technology that releases drugs into the body at the right time.
PULSED (short for Particles Uniformly Liquified and Sealed to Encapsulate Drugs) is the name of the new technology developed by bioengineers at Rice University in Texas. More than 300 of the small, non-toxic and biodegradable cylinders from the 3D printer fit into a conventional hypodermic needle.
These micro-cylinders consist of a polymer called PLGA, which is often used in clinical medicine and which dissolves at different rates depending on the recipe. McHugh and graduate student Tyler Graf can vary the time period over which the drugs contained in the micro-particles are released from one day to five weeks. In doing so, PULSED could help the estimated 50 percent of people who don’t take their medication properly.
When developing these microcapsules, it was important to avoid releasing a large part of the drug early and the small remainder slowly over days, as is the case with conventional drug encapsulation. As a result, the dose on the first day quickly approaches the toxicity limit and at later times the low dose no longer shows any effect. However, PULSED can be customized to circumvent this release issue and ensure constant drug delivery, the researchers explain.
The possible applications for the new microcapsules are diverse. “With toxic cancer chemotherapy, you want to concentrate the poison on the tumor and not on the rest of the body,” says McHugh. “Our microparticles stay where you put them. The idea is to make chemotherapy more effective and reduce its side effects by delivering a prolonged, concentrated dose of the drug exactly where it’s needed.” A constant delivery of certain drugs would also be ideal for many chronic diseases. “You can give the patient an injection and they’ll be taken care of for the next few months,” says McHugh.
So far, researchers have had difficulties with sealing the PLGA cladding structure. The contactless sealing by heating the opening, which is crucial for PULSED, lasts only a few seconds and was discovered almost by accident by the research team.