A pharmacy inside the body

The results of tests conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the company MicroCHIPS in a group of women with osteoporosis opens the door to the widespread use of remote administration of drugs. This was achieved by inserting a microchip under the skin which is capable of administering a medicine, thus allowing the patient to avoid daily injections of drugs.

And can’t patches do that already? Well, there are two main differences: the microchip allows remote control of drug release and also it can be used to administer more than one drug. The chip acts like a pharmacy inside the human body, a technology that can be used to treat from cancer to multiple sclerosis. Thinking further, I also envisaged the possibility of using the chip to administer vaccines automatically at the different stages of human development. And all this in a device with the size of a small pen drive!

And how does it work? The chip contains a daily dose of medication in small wells that are covered by a thin layer of gold nanoparticles which protects and prevents the drug from coming out.  The chip can be programmed to administer the medication according to a programmed schedule or commands sent wirelessly through a special frequency. These commands cause the gold to dissolve and allow the drug entering the bloodstream.

For testing, a group of seven women aged between 65 and 70 had the chip implanted through a simple procedure performed under local anesthesia. For four months the chip administered them an osteoporosis drug called teriparatide in doses comparable to those provided by injections, without any negative side effects.

“We hope this really is the dawn of a whole new way of thinking about delivering medications,” said co-author Robert Langer, a professor of cancer research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  However, for he and his and colleagues, “the ‘hairpin’ road to the clinic might be long and winding, but a versatile implantable device that exploits the microchip approach for controlled drug delivery will be well worth the wait for patients with chronic diseases,”