The story behind Gecko Biomedical’s biocompatible sealant starts in the summer of 2009, when Boston Children’s Hospital‘s chief of cardiac surgery reached out to Jeffrey Karp about a problem he was experiencing in the operating room. Dr. Pedro del Nido told Karp, a professor of medicine at Harvard and the director of the Laboratory for […]
Smart bandage releases medication as needed
A team of researchers from the University of Nebraska, Harvard Medical School and MIT have created a smart bandage that can be loaded with antibiotics, painkillers or other drugs and triggered by a smartphone. The bandage, made of electrically conductive fibers individually coated in a drug-loaded hydrogel, could be used to deliver multiple drugs at […]
Drug-carrying particle contains multiple doses of vaccine – in one injection
Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology have invented a method to generate drug-ferrying particles that can deliver multiple doses of a vaccine over an extended length of time with just one injection. The particles, made from a biocompatible, FDA-approved polymer, look like tiny coffee cups that can be filled with a drug and sealed. The polymer […]
7 diagnostic devices to boost healthcare in the developing world
The World Health Organization estimates that a quarter of death and disease globally is caused by hazards and environmental burdens in developing countries with little to no access to preventative care and diagnostic devices. Since developing countries are poor agricultural regions that are still becoming economically and socially advanced, it is harder for doctors to […]
MIT researchers developing device to pump drugs to the brain
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing a pump to deliver drugs directly to the brain. Alejandro Aponte, a mechanical engineering major at the University of Puerto Rico, has spent his summer working with Michael Cima, a professor of engineering, as part of MIT’s Summer Scholars program. The team’s pump prototype is attached […]
Responsive, ingestible drug-delivery material could boost patient compliance
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brigham & Women’s Hospital have developed a novel, responsive drug-delivery material that can reside in the stomach for up to nine days. The teams work was published today in Nature Communications. “One of the biggest issues in health care is noncompliance, people simply not taking their drugs,” co-senior […]
MIT researchers fight drug-resistant bacteria with nanoparticles
Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are using nanoparticles to tackle drug-resistant bacteria, according to a study published in Advanced Materials. Gram-negative bacteria are particularly difficult to treat, since they are protected by two cell membranes. But the team of Cambridge-based researchers reported that antimicrobial peptides inside of a silicon nanoparticle effectively reduced the number […]
Powering the next generation of ingestible drug delivery devices
Traditional implants in the gastrointestinal tract are meant to pass through a patient’s system, delivering a drug in short bursts or recording the health of a patient’s colon. But in recent years, scientists have sought after ultra-long lasting ingestible devices that can deliver drugs for several weeks in a patient’s GI tract. Lyndra, Inc., a start-up […]
Patients with Parkinson’s disease help shape clinical trial design
Margaret Sheehan isn’t a scientist, but she is 1 of many patient scientists joining an effort to incorporate Parkinson’s patients’ preference into the design of clinical trials for new treatments. Sheehan, a Virginia-based lawyer, has had Parkinson’s disease since 2004. She told Drug Delivery Business News that when the folks at the Medical Device Innovation Consortium presented last spring […]
Lyndra gets boost for drug delivery platform from U.S. allergy institute
Lyndra said today that it won a 5-year grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a branch of the National Institutes of Health. The grant is slated to support the formulation and preclinical development of a once-weekly oral HIV treatment. The Watertown, Mass.-based company makes use of a sustained-release technology developed by Robert […]
