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Rice Tech Could Deliver Time-Released Drugs, Vaccines

It’s estimated that 50 percent of people don’t take their medications correctly. New technology developed at Rice University would give patients one shot and they’d be set for the next couple of months.

“This is a huge problem in the treatment of chronic disease,” said Kevin McHugh  , corresponding author of a study about the technology published online in Advanced Materials. “It’s estimated that 50% of people don't take their medications correctly. With this, you’d give them one shot, and they’d be all set for the next couple of months.”

Topics:
Drug Delivery Medical

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    Transcript

    00:00:02 Basically we're trying to solve problems with drugs. We all know that drugs have an enormously beneficial impact on society, but can we make them better? Where do they fail? Right. They fail because they don't have sufficient efficacy. They lack safety or they’re really inconvenient to take. And so by making these microparticles, we can inject one time and get a bunch of doses that come out in sequence. These are very small. They may look big, but we're actually looking at these under a microscope to generate these images.

    00:00:31 The picture of the needle, we have microparticles filled with various food colorings just so they look nice, sealed. Essentially, they would be ready if they were filled with therapeutic to be injected. Making them really small is exceptionally difficult. And so what we've done is develop this new method called pulsed, where we can make a tiny box and seal it. So once these microparticles and made the really unique aspect about them is they can be injected in one go but release at different time points with age related macular degeneration.

    00:01:03 You have to get injections into your eye, which is very, I imagine, very uncomfortable and something that would I would have fear doing. So one application we want to do is inject different populations of these microparticles into the eye so that we can mimic clinical dosing schedules so that instead of getting an injection every month, we can space that out to an injection every three months or six months. And imagine that replacing daily oral dosing, daily injectable dosing and having these particles released over extremely long periods of time. So you can mimic maybe multiple doses of a vaccine that are usually administered over a long

    00:01:39 period of months. So instead of getting an injection now another one a month from now, another one two months from now, you can imagine it being useful for cancer applications as well. We can potentially inject these particles into a tumor so that they can deliver drugs precisely at the location that they're needed and not have a toxic effect on the rest of the body. So those are some of the ways that we imagine our technology could be impactful across a bunch of different applications The goal of drug delivery is to

    00:02:05 how do you make drugs better, how do you deliver them more effectively. Our system is unique in that respect that we have a little bit more fine tune over the release of the therapeutic and when it comes out.