Scientists have developed a “chewing robot” that can be used to test medicinal chewing gum

In view of how essence and other compounds slowly dissipate from chewing gum during chewing, scientists are now studying how to control the oral delivery of drugs through drug chewing gum. They are designing a new robot to standardize chewing tests.

The "humanoid chewing robot" developed by the University of Bristol in the UK combines a set of human sized mechanical jaws to replicate typical human chewing movements. In addition, just like chewing stimulates human saliva secretion, robots also secrete artificial saliva through connected silicone tubes during chewing.

In laboratory testing, both the robot and a group of human volunteers chewed gum with a sweet taste of xylitol for a total of 20 minutes. Throughout the entire period, natural and artificial saliva samples were collected from both humans and robots every 5 minutes.

Subsequently, scientists analyzed these samples to understand how the amount of xylitol released from chewing gum and entering saliva changed over time. The results of all volunteers and robots were very similar, with a large release occurring in the first 5 minutes of chewing, and by 20 minutes, there was already very little xylitol left.

Now, people hope that future generations of chewing robot prototypes can be used to evaluate the release rate of drug gels in a standardized and controllable manner.

"Bioengineering has been used to create an artificial oral environment that closely mimics the environment discovered by humans," said Dr. Kazem Alemzadeh, Chief Scientist. "Our research shows that chewing robots provide pharmaceutical companies with the opportunity to study drug chewing gum, and using this new method can reduce patient exposure and lower costs."

The paper on this study was recently published in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical Engineering.

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