2022 WCIA Series: RaniPill's pill may render routine injections for millions of patients obsolete

It looks like an ordinary pill that’s roughly the size of a fish-oil supplement. But when someone swallows the capsule, they don’t digest it. Instead, when it makes its way into the intestines, it uses a tiny dissolvable needle to give a painless injection. 

The device, called the RaniPill, is the winner of the health category of Fast Company’s 2022 World Changing Ideas Awards, and it’s designed to solve an important challenge: Millions of patients have conditions that can be effectively treated with injections, but many of them avoid taking shots. 

Advertisement

“There’s this incredible aversion among patients for any injection,” says Talat Imran, CEO of Rani Therapeutics, the startup that designed the pill. “But as of now, there’s no alternative. So you don’t hear about it as much and pharma companies don’t have to deal with it, because there isn’t another choice. We’re going to solve that problem.” 

In its first clinical trial, the company found that its approach could deliver a similar amount of drugs as an ordinary injection. “The simplest way to think about it is a swallowable auto-injector,” Imran says. “It looks like a capsule; when the patient takes it, they can’t tell the difference.” A coating on the pill, sensitive to pH levels, makes it move through the stomach without dissolving. When it reaches the small intestine, it expands, and a tiny needle pokes the wall of the intestine. “There are no pain receptors in your gut, so you don’t feel the injection,” he says.

The company, which raised $73 million in an IPO in 2021, currently has five drugs under development—all already approved, and most off-patent, for conditions including cancer and rare diseases—to test the efficacy of their use with the auto-injector. The next trial will test how the pill performs with an osteoporosis drug that requires daily shots. 

“There’s probably 3 million women in the U.S. alone who have osteoporosis, but probably less than 70,000 who are on one of these really effective anabolic treatments,” he says. “And a big chunk of that is because it’s hard to get anyone to comply with the daily injection.” In a survey of patients with a variety of conditions that require injections, the company found that even people who only required an injection every six months would rather take a daily pill. For some patients, the ability to take a pill might also mean getting treatment earlier, potentially changing the progression of their disease. 

The switch could also address the challenge of needle waste, because the tiny, polymer-based needles inside the pill are designed to dissolve inside the intestine as the drug is released. 

The company still needs to show in trials that the pills are safe for repeated use and prove the efficacy for each drug, along with whether it can scale up manufacturing to meet what could be a large demand. “We feel confident about it,” says Imran. “But these are things that we need to prove.”