Drug delivery

Diabetics sick of daily injections may have renewed hope for a less invasive alternative. Scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC) have developed a new delivery method for insulin where users just place a few drops under their tongue.

It slices, it dices, it's super strong and conductive, and now an ultra-pure form of ‘wonder material’ graphene has been inhaled during a human trial without affecting lung or cardiovascular function, opening the door to a novel drug delivery mode.

No matter how important something is, too much of anything is bad for you. Scientists have now put that principle to work to kill cancer, with a new drug that causes calcium to build up and choke the tumor to death.

Nobody likes having to get needles on a frequent basis, or even having to take multiple medications orally throughout the day. A wearable patch could help, by painlessly administering different drugs through the skin when triggered by a smartphone.

Peptide therapeutics – like insulin – are typically restricted to administration by invasive injection. Now, researchers have reached a "major milestone", creating an oral peptide that could revolutionize how disease treatment is delivered.

Managing diabetes usually involves regular shots, but soon patients might only need injections a few times a year. Stanford has developed a hydrogel-based delivery system that slowly releases drugs over months to control diabetes and even weight.

In what will soon be commonplace in drug research, scientists have used an artificial-intelligence algorithmic program to identify a compound, currently used in antimalarial treatment, that can effectively reverse the bone deterioration of osteoporosis.

Nobody likes getting needles, but unfortunately there are some medications that can only be administered via injection. That could be about to change, however, thanks to the invention of a suction cup that you stick in your mouth.

While we've heard about a number of drug-dispensing medical implants, most of them have the same drawback – they end up getting covered in scar tissue. An experimental new one avoids that problem by changing shape as the tissue starts to form.

Round pills are easier to swallow, but that doesn’t offer much control in how they release their drug payload. Max Planck scientists have now developed a model for designing complex 3D-printable pill shapes that release drugs in a specific way.

Getting young children or the elderly to take medications, especially if they're yucky-tasting syrups, large tablets, or – worse – injections, can be tricky. Researchers have developed an oral film that offers painless, hassle-free drug delivery.

A natural arms race, usually between predator and prey, is one of the most fascinating phenomena in evolutionary biology. But if humans don't find a way to get ahead in our fight with bacteria, we may be dealing with 10 million deaths a year by 2050.