MalariaUltra-long acting pill releases daily doses of medicine for a month

Imagine swallowing a pill today that continues releasing the daily dose of a medicine you need for the next week, month, or even longer. Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and their collaborators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a long-acting drug delivery capsule that may help to do just that in the future. To test the capsule’s real-world applications, the team used both mathematical modeling and animal models to investigate the effects of delivering a sustained therapeutic dose of a drug called ivermectin, which is used to treat parasitic infections such as river blindness. Ivermectin has an added bonus of helping keep malaria-carrying mosquito populations at bay. Brigham and Women’s Hospital says that the team found that in large animal models, the capsule safely stayed in the stomach, slowly releasing the drug for up to fourteen days, and potentially providing a new way to combat malaria and other infectious diseases. The results of this work are published in Science Translational Medicine.

“We want to make it as easy as possible for people to take their medications over a sustained period of time. When patients have to remember to take a drug every day or multiple times a day, we start to see less and less adherence to the regimen. Being able to swallow a capsule once a week or once a month could change the way we think about delivering medications,” said co-corresponding author C. Giovanni Traverso, a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer in the Division of Gastroenterology at BWH and an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Medication non-adherence is a massive problem in the United States and globally. In the United States alone, non-adherence is estimated to lead to more than $100 billion in expenses annually. Medication non-adherence is also a persistent problem in low-resource settings, where there may not be reliable access to health care and the full course of a medication. To help develop a new solution, the multi-disciplinary research team included members with expertise in biomechanical engineering, pharmaceutical sciences, infectious disease modeling, polymer chemistry and health care innovation.