An ingestible device inflates in the stomach to provide satiety and then quickly disintegrates and leaves the body naturally.
The weight-loss market is, pun perhaps intended, huge.
Recent years have seen the advancement of dieting drugs, but many of these include painful injections and a whole slew of side effects.
An Israeli startup, meanwhile, enables people interested in losing a moderate amount of weight to take a pill that leaves them feeling full without drugs.
“The idea was to develop a product that can be swallowed through the mouth and which opens up in the stomach to apply pressure on the stomach wall and so produce a feeling of satiety,” Epitomee CEO Dr. Dan Hashimshony tells ISRAEL21c.
“That’s something that’s easy to say, but making it happen is very challenging.”
The idea was floated in a group led by inventor and entrepreneur Shimon Eckhouse, whom Hashimshony joined some seven years ago. They focused on numerous technologies until they decided on one that allows the pill to swell up in the stomach and disintegrate in the digestive system.
“It took us a few years, and we took the idea forward and focused on one technology. We understood that while it’s important to develop a product that can inflate in the stomach, it also has to separate from the body perfectly and immediately,” Hashimshony explains.
“Here we had to tackle the challenge of developing a large device – each of its sides is over 2 inches long – that can stay put for a while but that disintegrates into tiny particles within minutes upon reaching the intestines.”
