Gel May Cut Doses for Some Drugs.

A material invented at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., is showing promise as a drug-delivery system that might replace some multiple-dose medications with a single daily formulation. The material, called "superporous hydrogels," expands dramatically when immersed in water. Oral drug-delivery formulations made from the gels would swell rapidly in the stomach, causing medications to move more slowly from it to the intestines.

Because the medications would remain in the stomach longer, they would be absorbed more efficiently by the body. Such a system might make it possible to take certain medications once daily, instead of three or more times a day, suggests Kinam Park, professor of pharmaceutics and biomedical engineering, the material's inventor.

Unlike other gels being tested for drug delivery, the superporous hydrogels swell to hundreds of times their dehydrated form within a matter of seconds, she says. Conventional hydrogels of the same size take hours to expand. The...