An accidental discovery in UCR’s laboratory will make drugs related to diabetes and cancer liable for oral transport into body.
Injections are one of the bitter part of medical treatments. Not only children but adults too are often afraid of getting injected by needles. Especially in the treatment of diseases like diabetes and cancer where lot of needles are injected on daily basis, the treatment gets even more bitter. But there was not a better option to this as some of the medications of these disease are water soluble. Thus transporting them orally to intestine which contain our food and drinks is not a good option as most of the quantity of medicine will exit through urine and sweat, thus making it less effective.
But now scientists from University of California, Riverside have discovered a new technique to solve this problem. They have succeeded in adding a chemical tag to these drugs. This tag will help them enter the blood supply through intestines, thus making it possible to consume them orally.
In a research paper that was published in Journal of American Chemical Society, the researchers explained the technique of applying chemical tags to these drugs and their effectiveness. Min Xue, chemistry professor in UCR explains that the chemical tag is made of a small peptide which is a protein fragment. As they are small molecules, it is possible to attach them chemically to drugs and due to it they can be delivered orally. Actually Min Xue and his colleagues were working on some other project when they accidentally found these peptides making their way into cells. The next challenge researchers face is of extending the range of drugs which can be attached with chemical tags.
