Mussels may have a connection to better medicine

Mussels have the ability to stick themselves to rocks, wooden pilons, steel ships, anything wet.  Whereas most glues are useless in water, nature has allowed mussels to hold fast against  even raging storm currents and waves.

This “superglue” is now being studied in conjunction with oral delivery of medicines. Many people have a strong dislike for needle injections, and often the dosage or frequency of pills and other medicines taken orally has to be increased to be effective as they pass too quickly through the digestive system.

Marta Cerutti is the director of the bio-synthetic interfaces lab in the department of mining and materials engineering at McGill University in Montreal.

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 She says that while medicines now  are able to withstand and pass through the acid of the stomach, and then be delivered to the intestine where the different pH opens the pill and the medicine is delivered. However, often the speed of material through the intestine means not all of it has time to be absorbed through the intestine wall.

What her lab is developing is a combination of the synthetic mussel “glue” and a gel containing the medicine.   The new development is to use this natural glue to help stick the medicine to the intestine wall where it can be fully delivered before the glue/gel itself is absorbed.  The glue/gel could also be used in other applications such as sticking medicine to a cheek where it is slowly dissolved and absorbed, or perhaps directly to a cancer site.  Diabetics could simply swallow a pill with the medicine instead of having to inject themselves daily.

The next step will be to test the product on live animals, and if all goes well it may reach the commercialization stage in five years.

Professor Cerutti is collaborating on the project with Professor Jake Barralet from the faculty of dentistry, Jinke Xu and Ghareb Soliman

LANGMUIR article abstract Mollusk Glue Inspired Mucoadhesives for Biomedical Applications