A vibrating electronic pill to feel full and lose weight? Study says it worked on pigs

(CN) — There are thousands, if not millions, of people eager to relieve you of your money with the promise of a diet, a pill, “one weird trick” or countless other ways to lose weight. A study published Friday suggests that an electronic, vibrating pill that induces the illusions of fullness could be the next frontier in weight loss.

So far, it’s worked on pigs.

According to lead study author Shriya Srinivasan, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Harvard University, the central question was, “How can we trick mechanoreceptors to do what we want to do?”

The roughly 10-by-30 mm pill Srinivasan and her colleagues designed has a vibrating motor that runs on a silver oxide battery and activates once the pill is ingested and disintegrates in gastric fluid.

As the pill starts vibrating, it activates mechanoreceptors, sensory receptors that send signals to the central nervous system, which in turn releases serotonin and prompts a hormonal response that artificially signals feeling of being satiated.

Srinivasan’s team tried out the pill on six four- to six-month-old Yorkshire pigs, each weighing between 110 to 176 pounds.

The pigs, whose gastric anatomy is similar to that of humans, had a significant reduction of ghrelin, “the hunger hormone,” after taking the vibrating pills. They ate 40% less food than usual over the course of 108 meals, which decreased the rate at which they gained weight, according to the results published in the journal Science Advances.

Even though they ate less than they normally would have, the pigs were less active after meals, a condition Srinivasan likened to a “food coma.” After four days, the pills passed out of the pigs’ digestive systems.

Srinivasan hopes to begin testing the pills on humans next, possibly in the next year or two, with the help of investor funding.

The team expects the treatment cost to be “in the cents to dollar range,” once it reaches scale, thanks to “injection molding techniques and mass manufacturing of electronics.”

“Coupled with natural passage, this makes the VIBES a consumable device, requiring no reacquisition or recharging of the device,” Srinivasan and her colleagues write in the study. “For certain patient populations, this enables temporary therapy, without the need for surgery.”

The researchers say the pill, which is designed to be taken 20 to 30 minutes before a meal, didn’t cause adverse side effects in pigs — compared to the side effects of weight loss drugs like Ozempic, which can be particularly taxing for patients without ready access to medicine and health facilities.

Researchers dubbed the pill VIBES, a zeitgeist-y backronym that Srinivasan explained in an email to Courthouse News.

“It was a combination of the way we use that word commonly… ‘good vibes’ etc., and the fact that it made for a good acronym,” Srinivasan said.