Imagine a professional inflating a balloon with a small pump. No, we’re not talking about a clown at a birthday party, but engineers in a laboratory designing a medical product to treat obesity.
Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have designed a new type of dynamic gastric balloon—a balloon that goes in the stomach—for weight loss treatment. The design, detailed in a December 3 study in the journal Device, can be inflated on command, and could offer an alternative for weight loss drugs and invasive procedures such as gastric bypass surgery.
A traditional gastric balloon is essentially a bag of air or saltwater surgically inserted into the stomach to give the patient a feeling of fullness and prevent them from overeating. While this has proved effective for weight loss in the short term, the stomach has the frustrating ability to adjust to the new sensation, making the benefits temporary, according to the study. The MIT engineers’ new design aims to avoid this result by inflating and deflating as needed, never allowing the stomach to adjust.
“The basic concept is we can have this balloon that is dynamic, so it would be inflated right before a meal and then you wouldn’t feel hungry. Then it would be deflated in between meals,” Giovanni Traverso, who participated in the study and is also a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said in a university statement. The engineers tested this concept on pigs, and reported that the animals ate 60% less when the gastric balloon was inflated before their meals.
The MIT researchers placed the device in the pigs’ stomachs through an incision in the abdomen and controlled its inflation with an external pump connected to the gastric balloon via a tube similar to a feeding tube. Human patients could attach the external controller to their skin.
“If people, for example, are unable to swallow, they receive food through a tube like this. We know that we can keep tubes in for years, so there is already precedent for other systems that can stay in the body for a very long time. That gives us some confidence in the longer-term compatibility of this system,” Traverso explained. The recent study was too short to record weight loss in the animals, so the researchers are now planning future long-term projects.
“The deployment for traditional gastric balloons is usually six months, if not more, and only then you will see good amount of weight loss. We will have to evaluate our device in a similar or longer time span to prove it really works better,” said Neil Zixun Jia of MIT, who led the study.
Originally, the researchers had created two prototypes for weight loss alternatives: the new gastric balloon and a four-armed device that pushed against the stomach wall. They ultimately pursued the former, sensing that “the balloon probably distributed the force better,” and “is probably a safer approach in the long run,” Traverso explained.
While Ozempic takes the world by storm, these engineers have designed a potential future alternative for patients who, for any number of reasons, cannot treat obesity through medications or invasive surgeries such as gastric bypass surgery or stapling.