The robotic pill that removes mucus from the intestine?

A robotic mucus-sucking pill may offer a new way to deliver drugs. The multivitamin-sized device houses a motor and a cargo hold for drugs, including those typically given by injection or intravenously, such as insulin and some antibiotics. If people could take such drugs orally, they could avoid daily injections or a hospital stay, which would be a huge game changer, according to MIT biomedical engineers.

But drugs that enter the body through the mouth face a rocky journey, encountering scrambled stomach acid, raging digestive enzymes, and sticky blobs of mucus in the gut. Intestinal mucus acts like jelly, the sticky substance can trap drug particles, preventing them from entering the bloodstream.

The new device, called the RoboCap, eliminates this problem. The pill uses torpedo-inspired shallow grooves, studs and flaps to remove intestinal mucus like a miniature brush spinning inside a bottle. In experiments with pigs, RoboCap tunneled through the mucus lining the walls of the small intestine, depositing insulin or the intravenous antibiotic vancomycin along the way, after churning for about 35 minutes, the pill continued its journey through the intestine and eventually exited the body.

RoboCap is the latest pill-like device made to swallow. In 2019, some of the same researchers who developed RoboCap came up with a different device, one that injects drugs by puncturing the inside of the stomach. That pea-sized injector wasn’t designed to work in the small intestine, where some drugs are more easily absorbed. The RoboCap can also deliver larger drug payloads, researchers say.