If you started a medication like  semaglutide in the last few years, you’ve probably gotten very  familiar with giving yourself shots.

Whether you were prescribed  Wegovy, Zepbound, or Ozempic, a lot of GLP-1 receptor agonists  require injecting yourself with a needle at least once a week. Which nobody loves!

But, in December 2025, things changed. The FDA approved an oral form of semaglutide, which packages the same medicine into pill form! Which begs the question: Why  wasn’t it a pill to begin with?

And why can’t every shot just be a pill? Here’s how scientists are  breaking down those roadblocks and working toward a future without needles. [♪ INTRO] As much as we hate them, and pretty  much everyone wishes we could just avoid them forever, needles are super important. They’re a really efficient  way to get what you need into the part of your body you need it in.

These days we have other options. You can take a pill for a lot of stuff. But traditional pills—like aspirin or ibuprofen— can only carry certain kinds of small molecules.

That’s because small molecules  are harder for your stomach acid to break down than large molecules. So they can slip through your stomach  lining and make it into your bloodstream. That’s why GLP-1s started out as injections.

They’re large molecules that can’t survive the treacherous passage through the stomach. At the end of the day, needles  are good at what they do… as much as we might hate them. And we really hate them.

In one sample of almost 2,000 people, more than half of the  children and around a quarter of the adults had a fear of needles. Another study of about the same size found that over 60% of adults were scared of needles! And even for those of us who  aren’t scared of needles, we’d still prefer not to get  a shot if it’s avoidable.

If a fear of or preference  against needles keeps even a small portion of us from getting vaccines, that could still result in hundreds of  thousands of unvaccinated people every year, which leaves the most vulnerable among  us in an even more precarious position. So doctors and patients alike  prefer an ingestible alternative, even when that involves taking a lot of them. And I already told you that researchers have successfully turned semaglutide into a pill.

So it’s possible. But we’re not quite at the point  where all injections can be pills. Here are some of the hurdles  that scientists are up against: In the case of semaglutide, the  molecules were too big to make it past your stomach before getting  destroyed by stomach acid.

So one of the recent oral semaglutide  pills skipped large molecules all together and instead created a small molecule version of the drug that’s resilient  to low pH environments. Problem solved! In this one case.

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You’ll get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans. Finding these small molecule  replacements is incredibly difficult. Many biological targets are like complex locks that require a very large, specific key.

Designing a tiny molecule  that fits into the same lock without getting stuck or also  opening a ton of other locks is a massive engineering challenge  that isn't possible for every drug. So instead, researchers designed a protective molecule to shepherd some larger molecules along. This addition allows you to swallow  semaglutide instead of injecting it.

And knowing how much scientists love silly names, I’d be shocked if it was just a  coincidence that they called it a SNAC. As the pill dissolves in your stomach, the SNAC gets released and  creates a little forcefield with a higher pH than the surrounding stomach acid. Then, semaglutide can safely  get absorbed from the stomach into the stomach lining and to the  bloodstream without falling apart.

So now you can get your  medication without any needles! But the SNAC approach isn’t perfect. When you take your medicine this way, you’re not getting the most bang for your buck.

That’s because the SNAC forcefield  is fragile and fleeting, so less than 1% of the medicine  actually gets to where it needs to go, as opposed to around 90% from an injection. Which is probably why one team of  researchers is going another route. They created a pill that turns the  medication itself into a tiny injection.

It all fits inside of a pill that’s  only about the size of a blueberry. The pill is encased in isomalt sugar glass, as if it comes from the Cake Boss himself. So when you swallow it, that delicate sugar  dissolves once it reaches the stomach.

That causes a tiny metal  spring inside it to uncoil and push the medication  directly into the stomach wall. As far as we can tell, the spring doesn’t hurt. And it works really well.

With this technique, up to 80%  of the drug reaches your blood, which is pretty similar to a  needle-based injection through the skin. These particular solutions aren’t  just good for semaglutides. Medications for autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis could  soon go needle-free as well!

For example, Humira and other  similar medications carry antibodies that prevent harmful  proteins from attacking your joints. These medications work pretty well, but they usually require  injections every other week, so a pill version would be a welcome alternative. Using small molecules or miniature injectables, it sounds like we’ve solved the needle problem.

Hurray! No more shots! But delivering large molecules  isn’t the only hurdle to overcome.

Another challenge is getting the  medicine to a specific destination. While needles can precisely  target specific parts of the body, pills or ingestibles aren’t as easy to steer. It’s difficult to guide them towards a  specific organ or part of the GI tract.

Lucky for us, researchers have come up  with a solution for that problem, too. In a paper published in 2019, scientists presented a solution inspired by… tortoises. When tortoises land belly-up,  they’re in grave danger.

But the geometry of the Leopard  Tortoise shell is almost mathematically optimal for getting  themselves belly-down again. The team borrowed this self-righting geometry  to create a self-orienting ingestible. Instead of flipping a tortoise  belly toward the ground, it flips medicine toward your stomach lining.

Once oriented, a small biodegradable  injector pops out and delivers the medicine. They tested this self-righting  mechanism in rats and pigs, and successfully delivered  insulin into their bloodstreams. Diabetic rodents, rejoice!

Hopefully this tech can help  diabetic people soon, too. And those researchers aren’t the only ones taking inspiration from the animal kingdom. Another group noticed something interesting about the way cephalopods propel themselves Squids and octopuses get around by pressurizing ocean water through their funnel-shaped siphons.

One research team created a  smaller version of those siphons to spurt medicine into different  organs along your GI tract, from your esophagus to your colon. Or maybe not yours. They successfully did it in pigs.

But it seems pretty promising. To target one organ or another, they adjusted the pressure of the  jet and let gravity do the rest. But there’s still a final challenge  with turning everything into a pill: not everyone can swallow pills.

So, researchers are working on a drinkable option! The reason you can’t make every  drug liquid is because there’s no controlled release of the medicine  the way pills can facilitate. But researchers are working on  a solution for that problem.

They’ve designed a liquid that comes in two parts. One contains the drug along with stuff  that can bind to the second liquid. And the second liquid is also  full of stuff that chemically transforms when it hits your stomach  acid to form a protective gel.

When you drink both of them,  they combine in your stomach and then the gel slowly breaks down over time to allow for that controlled  release we’re looking for. This was tested in an anti-malaria medication  given to pigs with promising results. So while we’re here in 2026  trying to turn shots into pills, these researchers are out in 2056  turning pills back into shots… the other kind of shots.

It’s all very exciting …with one giant caveat: Many of these solutions seem to be  safe from tests in non-human animals, but few of them have been demonstrated  to be safe and effective in humans yet. So there’s still a long way to go  before they make it to your pharmacy. If they do prove safe for humans, there would be some incredible  uses for these ingestibles, like cancer treatment or mRNA vaccines.

So, for those of us who hate needles,  that would be a very easy pill to swallow. [♪ OUTRO]