Can 'Robotic' Pills Replace Injections?
Baku, February 19 (AZERTAC). The adage "Take two aspirin and call me in the morning" is destined for a futuristic makeover. Doctors may just as easily recommend swallowing sophisticated gadgets instead.
That is the hope of prolific inventor Mir Imran, who has created a robotic pill to replace injectable drugs for chronic conditions such as diabetes. The gadget, in preclinical studies and backed by Google Inc. GOOG +0.67% 's venture-capital unit, consists of an ingestible polymer and tiny hollow needles made of sugar that are designed to safely deliver drugs to the small intestine.
Prolific inventor Mir Imran has created a "robotic" pill to replace injectable drugs for chronic conditions like diabetes. Mr. Imran joins the News Hub to explain, and Timothy Hay reports on the venture-capital community's interest in the invention.
Such a pill would have seemed unthinkable years ago. But advancements in technology and scientific research have recently led to two federally approved robotic pills.
The Food and Drug Administration earlier this month cleared the PillCam, a pill-sized camera from Given Imaging Ltd. GIVN -0.03% that photographs human insides in a hunt for colon polyps. Another company, Proteus Digital Health Inc., received clearance a year and a half ago to put ingestible sensors inside pills to help patients and doctors determine how many they have taken.
Mr. Imran's pill hasn't yet been tested in humans, so it is probably still at least a year away from even seeking federal approval. It also would require substantial financing to manufacture millions of pills. But if it is successful, the gadget has the potential to disrupt a multibillion-dollar market for injectable drugs and make life easier for millions of sufferers of conditions such as diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.
Mr. Imran is a safer bet than most entrepreneurs. The Indian-born founder of the research lab and business incubator InCube Labs in Silicon Valley has founded more than 20 medical-device startups, a dozen of which have been acquired by companies such as Medtronic Inc. MDT -1.21% He owns over 300 patents and helped develop the first implantable cardioverter defibrillator to correct irregular heartbeats.
Rani Therapeutics, the startup formed at InCube Labs to commercialize the robot pill, last year raised funds from Google Ventures and angel-investment fund VentureHealth.
Blake Byers, the Google Ventures general partner who spearheaded the investment, says Mr. Imran may be achieving one of the "holy grails" for biotechnology by figuring out how to deliver protein-based drugs such as basal insulin to the body without the use of a syringe.
Rani Therapeutics will spend another year testing the robot pill, he said, in the hope that it will have definitive clinical data in 2015.
If the data back up his claim about the pill, it could not only help millions of patients ditch their syringes and stick-pens, but it could remove another barrier for a range of early-stage treatments that currently have no safe avenue into the body, said Google Ventures' Mr. Byers.
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