Nanomedicine researchers at Houston Methodist are developing a novel drug delivery system for a diabetes drug. The new drug delivery system relies on triglycerides to transport the oral medication more effectively in the body. In their study, published in Science Advances, researchers were able to deliver the diabetes drug with a 25% absorption rate in mice models, which is very high for oral drugs.
"We know the human body can absorb fatty acids, so we decided to chemically link biological drug molecules to fatty acids to see how well these drugs are absorbed into the gastrointestinal system. It turns out that our 'transporter approach' was effective," said Haifa Shen, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of nanomedicine at Houston Methodist Research Institute.
This system’s design is based on previous research where the team developed a peptide-based drug used to treat diabetes mellitus that was chemically linked to fatty acids. Shen, and team, packaged the resulting combination in a nanoparticle making it resistant to gastric acids in the stomach. As soon as the drug entered the small intestine, it was released from the nanoparticle and the mice absorbed 24.8% of the drug dosage.
"This was just the first drug we tested. Our approach could be used to deliver many other biological drugs, such as human growth hormone and therapeutic antibodies," said Shen.