Drug Delivery Beyond Injections

A needle-free nasal spray could reach patients' brains where pills and injections both fail.

Existing measurement tools designed for pills miss how patients actually use injection therapies.

Sublingual and buccal routes can't overcome peptide size and permeability limits.

Stabilizing fragile molecules in depots remains the field's thorniest unsolved problem.

Skin's molecular gatekeeping makes most peptide drugs impossible to deliver without injections.

Researchers engineer patches and energy methods to deliver large peptides through skin.

Fear of needles keeps many chronic disease patients from taking life-saving injected medications.

Injection achieves near-total absorption, but oral peptides barely survive the digestive gauntlet.

Better autoinjectors ease the needle, but dropout keeps climbing.

Delivery route decides how much GLP-1 reaches the brain.

Stomach acid, gut barriers and the liver explain the 1% yield.

Enzymes, mucus, tight junctions, and efflux pumps each block oral peptides.

Nausea from GLP-1s triggers through both brain and gut pathways simultaneously.

Most GLP-1 users quit within a year, driven by side effects and weak early feedback on weight loss.