Problem

The inspiration behind The E.ncapsulator was the inherent difficulty in delivering protein pharmaceuticals to the gut. Due to the delicate nature of proteins and the highly acidic environment present in the stomach, protein molecules are readily broken down - making oral drug delivery of protein pharmaceuticals impossible.
There are several diseases that are treated using oral delivery of peptides. Among these are: Diabetes Mellitus and Phenylketonuria (PKU), a disease associated with mental retardation due to insufficient ability to metabolize phenylalanine.

Some statistics

Diabetes Mellitus (from [1])	PKU (from [2])
1 per 10,000 - 15,000 newborns are diagnosed with phenylketonuria in the USA	17,000,000 U.S. adults have physician-diagnosed diabetes (about 7.5 million males and 9.5 million females).
Prevalance Rate: approx 1 in 10,000 or 0.01% or 27,200 people in USA.	1,600,000 new cases of diagnosed diabetes are diagnosed every year.

In this project, one of our applications is on synthesising phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH), an enzyme responsible for metabolism of phenylalanine in PKU patients.

Our Solution

The E.ncapsulator is a novel protein manufacture and delivery platform designed to overcome these difficulties. In order to learn more about each module of the system and what its doing, hover over the different parts of the image below:

Major Results

Achievements

References

[1][http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/p/phenylketonuria/stats.htm Phenylketonuria]
[2][http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4551 Diabetes Mellitus]