Medication

Nobody likes gulping down a big pill, to the point that some people may not bother taking their medication because it's just too hard to swallow. A new system from MIT could help in that regard, by packing the same drug dose into a smaller pill.

Although we may all get a dry mouth from time to time, for some people it can be an ongoing debilitating condition. There could be new hope for such folks, however, thanks to a recent accidental discovery.

When a patient is receiving medication, it can be difficult to determine how much of the drug is actually making its way into their bloodstream. A new subdermal "tattoo" could help, thanks to its color-changing gold nanoparticles.

Even though at-home use of an inhaler or insulin pen can be extremely important, doctors have to pretty much just hope that patients are doing it right. A new system, however, could objectively assess patients' technique within their homes.

In order to see if an antidepressant works, patients have to take the drug for at least a month. New research, however, suggests that by monitoring a sleeping patient's brainwaves, the effectiveness of an antidepressant can be gauged in a week.

Opioid pain relievers not only produce potential side effects such as nausea and constipation, but they can also be highly addictive. Australian scientists have therefore created what could be a better medication, that is made using tarantula venom.

Giving oneself daily injections of insulin or other drugs is both painful and a hassle. A new "robo-pill" may make doing so unnecessary, however – and it reportedly performed well in its first human trials.

If you want pharmaceuticals to be cheap and plentiful, then you need a fast and inexpensive way of making them. With this in mind, Canadian scientists are developing a system that encapsulates liquid medication more speedily than ever before.

Tuberculosis is a difficult disease to treat, and help may now be coming from an unexpected source – a sea sponge.

A team at MIT has developed a new capsule that would survive a trip through the stomach and deliver its drug payload to the lining of the small intestine via microneedles.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly forms of the disease, thanks largely to the fact that the tumors tend to be much more solid. But now researchers have identified a promising new drug candidate that could linger for longer to worm its way in, and works when paired with other cancer drugs.

Organ development has traditionally been tricky to study, thanks largely to the difficulty in getting sensors in there without damaging the organs. Now, researchers from Harvard have developed a way to create “cyborg organoids” by integrating nanoelectronics into cell cultures.