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Drinking-gels as a pill alternative
Neil Baugh
March 20, 2024
TLDR: Drinking 2 liquids to form a solid as a pill alternative
Big Takeaways
Pills are great, but not for everyone. Many people struggle with pills and there aren’t many good alternatives.
Liquid medicines are often ineffective and cause the drugs to get washed away or degrade in the stomach.
Today’s paper addressed this issue by designing a drinkable system that turns into a solid gel in the stomach, keeping the medicine in place.
The Problem
Pills are a cornerstone of modern medicine. They’re easy to take, fast, and can be taken right at home. But not all drugs can be made into pills, and some people are incapable of swallowing them, including many children.
Liquid forms like cold medicine are easier to take, but often aren’t as effective. The liquid dilutes within the stomach, leading to much of the active drug component not being properly digested.
The Solution
Schematic of the system. Credit: Liu and Traverso et al. Nature Materials, 2024.
As an alternative to conventional pills, this week’s authors designed a liquid delivery system that turns solid once you drink the 2 components. Drink #1 is a mix of alginate (often used in popping boba) and PEG, a common additive in both medicine and skincare products. Drink #2 contains things that cause the materials in Drink #1 to join together, forming a solid gel in the stomach.
Drink them back to back and boom, you’ve got a drug-filled gel steadily releasing the cargo to where it needs to go.
Side note: popping boba is super easy to make at home. Check it out here. Follow this recipe and you’ll make a similar material to the one in the paper!
One thing some people find surprising is that the stomach is mechanically active. Meaning, things in the stomach experience relatively large forces. To check if their gels could withstand them, the authors repeatedly applied similar stresses to the materials and observed what happened. The gels withstood many stress cycles without breaking, indicating that they’d hold up in the stomach.
Finally, they had pigs try out the gel-drink. Using Xrays, they observed the gels forming in the pigs stomachs and sticking around for ~24 hours before degrading away. When loaded with drugs, the gel-drink protected them and made them last longer.
Xrays of the gel present in a pigs stomach. Credit: Liu and Traverso et al. Nature Materials, 2024.
One of my favorite things about this project is how simple it is. The materials they picked are commonly used and can be bought without any further modification required (aka no fancy chemistry that’s a pain to do).
The innovation is how they used the gels, not the gels themselves. We often get caught up trying to invent the new cool technology instead of trying to reimagine how we can use already existing things in new ways.
I’m left with one big question: how does the drink taste? And can it be Gatorade flavored instead of the usual gross cherry medicine flavor?
See you next week for more science,
Neil
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