oral insulin

I don't know how they plan to do it. Insulin is a polypeptide, like a short protein and therefore digestible. That's why it doesn't survive the alimentary canal and the molecule is probably too big to cross the membranes anyway. diabeticgeek will probabaly know more

A lot of research is being done in this area - both by research labs and by many biotech companies. Any organisation that cracks this and comes up with viable insulin pills will make very serious amounts of money. The easiest possibility is to use a mouth spray - that avoids the digestion problem. A company called Generex is testing this in various countries, and it is already available commercially in Ecuador and India. To make a pill is a lot more technically difficult, but still fundamentally feasible. You have to wrap the molecule up in a delivery system that protects it from digestion, but is still absorbed across the gut and released slowly. Some sort of nanosphere is generally used, and this has certainly been demonstrated in mice. I'm not aware of any human trials yet, although I haven't done a literature search - so there might have been something. There is a page on Oral Insulin on this very site - that has links to several companies that are working on this sort of thing. I think you can be fairly confident that it is coming.

I hate the scare tatics this company uses in its publicity. Insulin injections are not that horrific but more inportantly doseage is flexible to suit lifestyle and carbohydrate intake. How many different pills would be needed to achieve that flexibility? Moreover their suggested improved form of delivery for type 1s is a suppository. No thanks, I'll keep my pump.