MIT Paula Hammond (right) and Bryan Hsu PhD’ 14 have developed a nanoscale film that can be used to deliver medication, either directly through injections, or by coating implantable medical devices.
About one in four older adults suffers from chronic pain. Many of those people take medication, usually as pills. But this is not an ideal way of treating pain: Patients must take medicine frequently, and can suffer side effects, since the contents of pills spread through the bloodstream to the whole body. Now researchers at MIT have refined a technique that could enable pain medication and other drugs to be released directly to specific parts of the body - and in steady doses over a period of up to 14 months. The method uses biodegradable, nanoscale "thin films" laden with drug molecules that are absorbed into the body in an incremental process. "It's been hard to develop something that releases [medication] for more than a couple of months," says Paula Hammond, the David H. Koch Professor in Engineering at MIT, and a co-author of a new paper on the advance. "Now we're looking at a way of creating an extremely thin film or coating that's very dense with a drug, and yet releases at a constant rate for very long time periods." In the paper, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , the researchers describe the method used in the new drug-delivery system, which significantly exceeds the release duration achieved by most commercial controlled-release biodegradable films.
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