In a study recently published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, researchers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) produce a drug capsule coated with tiny needles that can directly inject drugs into the lining of the stomach once swallowed.

“This could be a way that the patient can circumvent the need to have an infusion or subcutaneous administration of a drug,” said co-author Giovanni Traverso, a research fellow at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, in a recent statement from MIT.

According to Daily Mail Online, researchers of the study used animal studies to find that the new capsule delivered insulin more efficiently than injections under the skin. The study also showed that there are no harmful side effects as the capsule passed through the digestive system.

“The kinetics are much better, and much faster-onset, than those seen with traditional under-the-skin administration,” said Traverso. “For molecules that are particularly difficult to absorb, this would be a way of actually administering them at much higher efficiency.”

MIT reports that the researchers should find the capsule useful beyond insulin, being able to effectively deliver biopharmaceuticals like antibodies used to treat a number of illnesses, such as arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and cancer.

“The large size of these biologic drugs makes them nonabsorbable,” said co-author Carl Schoellhammer, a graduate student in chemical engineering at MIT. “And before they even would be absorbed, they’re degraded in your GI tract by acids and enzymes that just eat up the molecules and make them inactive.”

“This is a very interesting approach,” said Samir Mitragotri, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the study. “Oral delivery of drugs is a major challenge, especially for protein drugs. There is tremendous motivation on various fronts for finding other ways to deliver drugs without using the standard needle and syringe.”