Ultrasound can speed up drug delivery and improve treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases like ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s, according to a new study from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital. The technique involves a repurposing of common technology that could someday be used in both clinical settings and for at-home treatment.
Though researchers used a generic ultrasound device for their study — which evaluated pigs and mice — they have plans to develop a low-frequency handheld device for the marketplace that would be optimized for human use and require minimal training to achieve the delivery of medication.
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Carl Schoelhammer, a postdoctoral fellow in chemical engineering and lead author of the study, told HCB News that their research demonstrated safety and delivery for bowel tissue in pigs, (which share tissue similarities with humans). The disease activity outcomes using the ultrasound technique alongside enema were better than the outcomes using enema alone.
Conventional treatment may involve an overnight enema, which can be difficult in the presence of typical IBD symptoms like diarrhea, whereas drug delivery using ultrasound could be completed in a minute or less. It achieves this "ultra rapid delivery" by bypassing tissue barriers in the GI tract that can interfere with drug uptake, said Schoelhammer.
Ultrasound-mediated drug delivery may have multiple therapeutic applications, according to Schoellhammer. He foresees “administering therapeutic agents via ultrasound for colon or rectal cancer and infectious conditions in the gastrointestinal or reproductive tracts."
"The action of ultrasound is not drug specific, which makes treating a broad range of diseases possible,” he added. The ultrasound drug delivery would minimize the need for reformulation and redevelopment of drugs because currently approved drugs could be used off the shelf.
This method of drug delivery is most appropriate for conditions where tight control of dosing isn’t necessary, like flooding tumors with chemotherapeutic agents. In their research the technique was used to deliver insulin, but since it requires tight dose control, they said it would not make an appropriate clinical application.
Schoelhammer anticipates that the new technology will be fairly inexpensive to adopt. He remarked that “companies may give the ultrasound device away and just sell the medication cartridge for about the same price as a current enema” and that developing the technology “could result in no increased costs to the patient, fewer administrations of medication and increased efficacy.”
The researchers are hopeful that this method of delivery may someday enhance convenience and privacy for patients with GI conditions that currently benefit from self-administered enemas. Their article, “Ultrasound-mediated gastrointestinal drug delivery" appeared in the October 21 issue of Science Translational Medicine.