2 weeks Ago By By Talker News
By Stephen Beech A new non-surgical contraceptive implant is delivered through tiny needles. The long-acting implant was developed by American scientists to minimize patient discomfort and increase the likelihood of medication use. Their findings in preclinical models provide the technological basis to develop self-administrable contraceptive shots that could mimic the long-term drug release of surgically implanted devices.
They say the new approach, described in the journal Nature Chemical Engineering , will reduce how often patients need to inject themselves and prove valuable for those with less access to hospitals. The study was conducted by scientists at Mass General Brigham and Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Study senior author Dr.
Giovanni Traverso, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said: “Needle size and liquid viscosity are crucial considerations for commercial translation of injectables. “Our engineering challenge was finding a way to maximize comfort for patients by using smaller needles, which cause less bruising or bleeding, and to make the viscosity low enough for easy application with the syringe by hand.” He explained that traditional contraceptive implants are small, flexible rods that are surgically inserted under the skin to slowly deliver drugs over time, removing the problem of remembering to take a pill.
But the surgery required for implants makes them less accessible to some patients. Dr. Traverso’s team developed a new approach to deliver the contraceptive drug levonorgestrel (LNG) through Self-assembling Long-acting Injectable Microcrystals (SLIM).
He said that SLIM acts like tiny puzzle pieces that, once injected inside the body, undergo solvent exchange to assemble into a single solid implant that slowly releases the drug as the surface erodes. Unlike similar self-administering technologies, the solvent exchange assembly enables delivery by much smaller needles. The research team is continuing its work to optimize the dosing, duration, and injectability of the SLIM system, including understanding how it performs in the human body.
They say the design could also be applied to other hydrophobic drugs, which make up most new pharmaceuticals. The researchers plan to investigate how different drug properties impact the SLIM system’s effectiveness. Dr.
Traverso added: “We anticipate that SLIM could be a new addition to the current suite of family planning options available to women, especially for people in low-resource settings where options for contraception and health care facilities are limited.".
