[Pharmwaste] A Wirelessly Controlled Pharmacy Dispenses Drugs From Within Your Abdomen

[Jeff Hollar]

Fascinating technology and interesting article...  Do not include me in the
test group.

Jeff Hollar
PharmWaste Technologies, Inc.
515-276-5302 (general)
515-331-7310 (direct)
515-360-9785 (cell)
www.pwaste.com



-----Original Message-----
From: Tenace, Laurie [mailto:Laurie.Tenace at dep.state.fl.us] 
Sent: Friday, February 17, 2012 7:12 AM
To: pharmwaste at lists.dep.state.fl.us
Subject: [Pharmwaste] A Wirelessly Controlled Pharmacy Dispenses Drugs From
Within Your Abdomen 

Here's a new waste stream to consider in the future. Would these implants
become mixed biomedical and electronic waste? They might help in cutting the
amount of unmetabolized drugs being excreted. I think new drug delivery
systems will keep us all on our toes! Photos here:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-02/first-time-wirelessly-contr
olled-implantable-pharma-chip-delivers-drugs-inside-body

In the future, implantable computerized dispensaries will replace trips to
the pharmacy or doctor's office, automatically leaching drugs into the blood
from medical devices embedded in our bodies. These small wireless chips
promise to reduce pain and inconvenience, and they'll ensure that patients
get exactly the amount of drugs they need, all at the push of a button.

In a new study involving women with osteoporosis, a wirelessly controlled
implantable microchip successfully delivered a daily drug regimen, working
just as well, if not better, than a daily injection. It could be an elegant
solution for countless people on long-term prescription medicines,
researchers say. Patients won't have to remember to take their medicine, and
doctors will be able to adjust doses with a simple phone call or computer
command.

Pharmacies-on-a-chip could someday dispense a whole suite of drugs, at
pre-programmed doses and at specific times, said Robert Langer, the
Institute Professor at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer
Research at MIT, who is a co-author on the study.

"It really depends on how potent the drugs are," he said. "There are a
number of drugs for things like multiple sclerosis, cancer, and some
vaccines that would be potent enough."

Langer and fellow MIT professor Michael Cima developed an early version of
an implantable drug-delivery chip in the late 1990s. They co-founded a
company called MicroCHIPS Inc., which administered the study being published
today in Science Translational Medicine. The team decided to work with
osteoporosis patients because the disease, and the drug used to treat it,
presented a series of special opportunities, Langer said. A widely used drug
called teriparatide can reverse bone loss in people with severe
osteoporosis, but it requires a daily injection to work properly. This means
up to 75 percent of patients give up on the therapy, Langer said. It's also
a very potent drug that requires microgram doses, making it an ideal
candidate for a long-term dispensary implant.


Related Articles
 Implantable Tumor Tracker Is a Tiny Lab That Lives Inside Your Body And
Reports Back  Wireless, Implantable Glucose Sensor Could Revolutionize
Diabetes Treatment  Silk-Silicon Implantable Electronics Conform to Tissues,
Then Melt Away

Tags
Technology, Feature, Rebecca Boyle, drugs, future of medicine, implantable
medical devices, lab-on-a-chip, medical devices, osteoporosis,
pharmaceuticalsGetting the chips to work well required some tinkering on the
part of the company, including the addition of a hermetic seal and
drug-release system that can work in living tissue. The chip contains a
cluster of tiny wells, about the size of a pinprick, which store the drug.
Each well is sealed with an ultrathin layer of platinum and titanium, Langer
said. At programmed times or at the patient's command, an external
radio-frequency device sends a signal to the chip, which applies a voltage
to the metal film, melting it and releasing the drug. The wells melt one at
a time.

"It's like blowing a fuse, the way we've got it set," Langer said. He said
the amount of metal is near nanoscale levels and is not toxic.

The team also had to ensure the chips were secure and could not be hacked.
The chips communicate via a special frequency called the Medical Implant
Communications Service band, approved by both the FCC and the FDA. A
bidirectional communications link between the chip and a receiver enables
the upload of implant status information, including confirmation of dose
delivery and battery life. A patient or doctor would then enter a special
code to administer or change the dose, Langer said.

The research team recruited seven women in Denmark who had severe
osteoporosis and surgically implanted the chips into their abdomens in
January 2011. The chips stored 20 doses of the drug. The patients had the
implants for a year, and they proved extremely popular, Langer said. "They
didn't think about the fact that they had it, since they didn't have to have
injections," he said.

Ultimately, the device delivered dosages comparable to daily injections, and
there were no negative side effects. There was no skipping the shot if a
patient didn't feel like visiting the doctor - complying with a prescription
is of key importance, said Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering
at MIT. "This avoids the compliance issue completely, and points to a future
where you have fully automated drug regimens," he said.

The study points out one interesting phenomenon that will inform future
research and development on these types of implants. When you implant a
device into a person's body, the body forms a fibrous, collagen-based
membrane that surrounds the foreign device. This can affect how well drugs
can move from the device and into the body, which in turn affects dosage
requirements and pharmaceutical potency. One of the aims of this study was
to examine the effects of that collagen membrane, and the researchers found
it did not have any deleterious effects on the drug.

Now that these chips have been proven to work, Langer and the others want to
test them with other drugs and for longer dosage periods, he said. Because
the well caps melt one at a time, the chips could be used to deliver
different types of drugs, even those that would normally interact with each
other if taken in shot or pill form, he said. The team wants to build a
version with 365 doses to see how well it works.

It could even be used as a long-term sensing device, he said, an interesting
possibility of its own. Medical sensing implants can degrade once they're in
the body, so implants that could check for things like blood sugar or cancer
antibodies can lose their effectiveness. But a chip with multiple sensors
can work a lot longer - once a sensor is befouled, simply melt another well
and expose a fresh one, Langer said.

The ultimate goal is to create a chip that could combine sensing and drug
delivery - an implantable diagnostic machine that can deliver its own
therapy.

"Someday it would be great to combine everything, but that will obviously
take longer," Langer said.

Laurie Tenace
Environmental Specialist III
Waste Reduction Section
Florida Department of Environmental Protection
2600 Blair Stone Rd., MS 4555
Tallahassee FL 32399-2400
P: 850.245.8759
F: 850.245.8811
Laurie.Tenace at dep.state.fl.us
Mercury: http://www.dep.state.fl.us/waste/categories/mercury/default.htm
Batteries: http://www.dep.state.fl.us/waste/categories/batteries/default.htm
Pharmaceuticals:  http://www.dep.state.fl.us/waste/pharm/





Please take a few minutes to share your comments on the service you received
from the department by clicking on this link Copy the url below to a web
browser to complete the DEP survey:
http://survey.dep.state.fl.us/?refemail=Laurie.Tenace@dep.state.fl.us