MICRONEEDLE PILL TAKES THE STING OUT OF INSULIN.

For almost a century, patients with diabetes have relied on injectable insulin to manage their condition--and, for nearly as long, researchers have pursued a way to administer insulin orally. While insulin injections can be lifesaving, they are unpleasant, cumbersome, and increasingly expensive for patients, so health-care providers often delay prescribing them in favor of less-effective oral medications.

A team of investigators from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Novo Nordisk has pioneered an oral formulation of insulin that can be swallowed--an ingestible microneedle which is able to inject insulin into the stomach lining. Results are published in Science.

"The work described builds and is motivated by a few critical clinical observations, including, when a drug is injected into the stomach wall that drug can become distributed through the body very quickly. Moreover, we recognize that the stomach is insensate to sharp pain and very tolerant of small, sharp objects," says...