Over the next few years popping a pill could be more than just taking a drug and hoping it works.
A biomedical company has created a system to embed tiny computers and sensors into drugs and link them to a cellphone or the internet in a bid to make the monitoring of drug efficacy foolproof.
The technology allows for automatic collection of vital patient data that can be used to manage chronic diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure. It can be particularly useful to closely track a patient's response to a particular dosage of medicine. The idea garnered the company on Thursday one of the 34 prestigious "technology pioneer" awards from the World Economic Forum.
“We are enabling intelligent medicine by adding sensors to existing therapies so it can be personalized to every individual on a cost-effective basis,” says George Savage, co-founder and chief medical officer of Proteus Biomedical.
The networked pill product, branded Raisin, is still in clinical trials, but it shows how technology and medicine are being melded in ways that are likely to change how we take drugs. More broadly, they could be part of a suite of technologies that enable personalized medicine, the long-promoted ideal of tailoring drug treatments to an individual's physiological and genetic profile. Proteus executives have compared their system to the electronics that help mechanics diagnose problems in cars.
Proteus' product consists of two parts: an ingestible sensor chip and an external band-aid-like patch. The chips are just 1mm square and 200 microns thick and are attached to pills with a bio-compatible glue. When swallowed the chips send a signal to the patch. The patch has accelerometers and amplifiers to track heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature and body angle to determine if the patient is lying down or standing up.
That information is transmitted via Bluetooth to an online repository and can show how the body is responding to the drug, says Savage.
“This provides automated physiological data that gets uploaded with a time stamp to the internet,” he says. “So when physicians see a patient for a few minutes they know exactly what is going on.”
Proteus, which was founded in 2001 in Redwood City, California and has 66 employees, has raised more than $90 million in equity and debt financing, including $32 million in late-stage funding in October.
The company has had two clinical trials for the product and is hoping to get market clearance from the FDA by the middle of next year. Still, it will be 2011 before the first products hit the market, says Savage.
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