- The pill goes from the patient’s stomach to the small intestine and administers the medicines.
- Imran and his team want to prioritize the development of a pill to address acromegaly as its treatment includes a painful injection.
Rani Therapeutics develops an auto-injecting pill that can substantially replace subcutaneous injection. The idea of a robotic pill was conceptualized from a research project some eight years ago from InCube Labs. Mir Imran, who is Rani Therapeutics Chairman and CEO, runs InCube Labs which is a life sciences lab. Mir Imran has degrees in Electrical Engineering and biomedical engineering from Rutgers University.
About Imran Mir, CEO, and Chairman of Rani Therapeutics:
Imran is a founder of around 20 medical device companies and aided the development of the first implantable cardiac defibrillator. Imran and his team have been working on the technology behind San Jose-based Rani Therapeutics. They wanted to find a way to replace the painful subcutaneous injections while improving the medicine’s efficiency.
How does the injectable pill work?
“The technology itself started with a very simple thesis,” said Imran in an interview. “We thought, why can’t we create a pill that contains a biologic drug that you swallow, and once it gets to the intestine, it transforms itself and delivers a pain-free injection?”
Rani Therapeutics bases its approach on the natural properties of the gastrointestinal tract. This coating melts as it reaches from the patient’s stomach to the small intestine. As the reactants start working and release carbon dioxide, it inflates a small balloon which forms a pressure difference. This pressure difference helps the pill to inject the drug-filled needles into the intestinal wall. Imran says, “So it’s a really well-timed cascade of events that results in the delivery of this needle.”
Even though it looks like the pill has a mechanical procedure to release the medicines into the body, it does not have any metal or springs. This eliminates the chances of any kind of inflammation. The components and needles of the pill are made with injectable-grade polymers which are also used in other medical devices, according to Imran.
Imran wanted to relieve the patients of the pain from subcutaneous injections. “It wouldn’t make sense to replace them with another painful injection,” he said. “But biology was on our side because your intestines don’t have the kind of pain sensors your skin does.” Moreover, the administration of the injection into the highly vascularized intestinal walls improves the efficiency of the administered medicine compared to the subcutaneous injection. This is because subcutaneous injection typically deposits the medicine into the fatty tissue of the body.
Imran’s future plans:
Imran and his team plan to use the pill to treat and address various health issues like acromegaly which is a growth hormone disorder, diabetes, and osteoporosis. In January 2020, they successfully ran a clinical trial of Octreotide, a treatment for acromegaly. The pill demonstrated both safety and sustainability in primary clinical trials.
Imran and his team hope to pursue clinical trials for other medicines but have chosen to prioritize acromegaly. The reason behind this is the disorder has a well-established treatment drug that has a very painful injection treatment. By the end of last year, Rani Therapeutics managed to raise $69 million in new funding to further develop and test its platform. This will finance us for the next several years,” said Imran. “Our approach to the business is to make the technology very robust and manufacturable.”
