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Digestible
microchips embedded in drugs may soon tell doctors whether a patient is taking
their medications as prescribed. No
matter how fast pharmaceutical companies can churn out drugs to prevent or cure
illnesses, health insurance doesn't cover the cost of hiring a person to follow
you around and remind you to take your meds. So the FDA has approved a pill
that can do it on its own by monitoring your insides and relaying the
information back to a healthcare provider.
“About
half of all people don’t take medications like they’re supposed to,” says Eric
Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La
Jolla,California. “This device could be a solution to that problem, so that
doctors can know when to rev up a patient’s medication adherence.” Topol is not
affiliated with the company that manufactures the device, Proteus Digital
Health in Redwood City,California, but he embraces the sensor’s futuristic
appeal, saying, “It’s like big brother watching you take your medicine.”
The
sand-particle sized sensor consists of a minute silicon chip containing trace
amounts of magnesium and copper. When swallowed, it generates a slight voltage
in response to digestive juices, which conveys a signal to the surface of a
person’s skin where a patch then relays the information to a mobile phone
belonging to a healthcare-provider.
Currently,
the FDA, and the analogous regulatory agency in Europe have only approved the
device based on studies showing its safety and efficacy when implanted in
placebo pills. But Proteus hopes to have the device approved within other drugs
in the near future. Medicines that must be taken for years, such as those for
drug resistant tuberculosis, diabetes, and for the elderly with chronic diseases,
are top candidates, says George Savage, co-founder and chief medical officer at
the company.
“The
point is not for doctors to castigate people, but to understand how people are
responding to their treatments,” Savage says. “This way doctors can prescribe a
different dose or a different medicine if they learn that it’s not being taken
appropriately.”
Proponents
of digital medical devices predict that they will provide alternatives to
doctor visits, blood tests, MRIs and CAT scans. Other gadgets in the pipeline
include implantable devices that wirelessly inject drugs at pre-specified
times, and sensors that deliver a person’s electrocardiogram to their
smartphone.
In
his book published in January, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, Topol says
that the 2010s will be known as the era of digital medical devices. “There are
so many of these new technologies coming along,” Topol says, “it’s going to be
a new frontier for rendering care."
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