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 […]
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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 […]
Wireless power source could enable ingestible drug delivery devices
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory have developed the means to wirelessly power electronic devices that stay in the digestive tract indefinitely. The team suggests that these devices could be used as sensors in the GI tract or carry drugs to be delivered over […]
Lyndra raises $23m for long-acting drug delivery tech
Lyndra, Inc. said today that it closed a $23m Series A round, led by Polaris Partners, to fund the development of its long-acting therapeutic oral delivery platform. Quark Venture, GF Securities, Yonghua Capital, Healthlink Capital, Partners Healthcare, Suffolk Equity and others invested in the round. The Watertown, Mass.-based company touts its tech as the 1st […]
Fibrosis: How to prevent it in medical device implants
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston Children’s Hospital researchers have discovered a way to prevent fibrosis from forming around medical device implants by blocking certain cells. The body’s immune system usually attacks implanted medical devices that are used for drug delivery, sensing or tissue regeneration. Defense cells in the body try to isolate the […]
Study: Tethered nanoparticles help trigger cell death in cancerous tumor cells
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a way to amplify certain types of cancer treatment by tethering nanoparticles to cancerous tumor cells. The team’s work was published in Nature Communications. The researchers found that tethered nanoparticles increase the forces exerted on the cells by phenomena such as blood flow, therefore making the cells […]
New material illuminates when exposed to chemicals on the body
MIT engineers and biologists teamed up and designed a living-cell-injected hydrogel that can illuminate when exposed to certain chemicals. The MIT team made wearable sensors using the hydrogel with living cells that lit up after touching a surface with certain chemicals. The new material has the potential to detect chemicals in the environment and the […]