Federal Service for Intellectual Property (Rospatent) has summed up the results of the year 2021. According to RIA Novosti, the head of Rospatent Grigory Ivliev named three major inventions of the year in the field of medicine besides the ones related to the fight against Covid: a composite material with antibacterial effect, a disinfector robot, and insulin pills created by chemists of the Lobachevsky University. 

A patent was issued for a group of inventions “Nanostructured composition for oral delivery of insulin and a method for its production” resulting from the research by a team of Lobachevsky University scientists. As noted by Grigory Ivliev, nowadays insulin can be taken only by injection. Numerous attempts to produce insulin pills, as other drugs, have so far ended in failure: insulin rapidly decomposes in the gastrointestinal tract before it is absorbed into the bloodstream. Ivliev said:

Chemists from Nizhny Novgorod University have developed a composition that can solve the problem of insulin delivery. The drug they developed has a layered structure, including gold nanoparticles. Thanks to its structure and composition, the ‘new insulin’ is many times more resistant to the acidic environment of human stomach.