Smart Ingestible Injectable Devices: Novel Drug Devices for Oral Delivery of Biologics

Biologics, or Biological therapeutics, are among the most intriguing therapeutic agents with the potential to transform the treatment of chronic diseases completely. However, the primary challenge with biologics is their need for parenteral administration, which leads to poor patient compliance and treatment failure. Delivering biologics via a non-invasive oral route could help achieve high patient compliance, but this is hindered by gastric barriers. Carrier-based systems, mucoadhesive systems, transdermal administration, implantable pumps, peptide modification techniques such as cyclization, PEGylation, glycosylation, etc., and co-formulation with permeation enhancers have been tried for the above-mentioned purpose, but with only minimal success. Therefore, in this short review, we gave an overview of the novel and emerging drug delivery technology - Ingestible Injectable or Ingestible Microneedle Robotic devices, which facilitate enhanced oral biologics uptake with higher compliance.