Replacing Injections with Oral Medications

Hydrogels move medical treatments home.

Medicine Technology

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July-August 2022

Volume 110, Number 4
Page 202

DOI: 10.1511/2022.110.4.202

Few things in life are more debilitating than a chronic disease, and these conditions are even more mentally draining for patients when their cause is mysterious. Take, for instance, the collection of conditions known as inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs). In the United States, some 60,000 individuals are diagnosed with IBDs each year, and a total of about 3 million individuals are living with the disease. Why the body suddenly sets off this painful and incapacitating inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract is not clearly understood, but it seems to involve aberrant signaling by cytokines, molecules that can act as danger signals to immune cells.

Courtesy of Olivia L. Lanier, made with BioRender

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