Showing posts with label Proteus Digital Health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Proteus Digital Health. Show all posts

Aug 21, 2012

Smarter Pills

The Food and Drug Administration has just approved a device that is integrated into pills and let’s doctors know when patients take their medicine and when they don’t.

The device, made by Proteus Digital Health, is a silicon chip about the size of a sand particle. With no battery and no sensor, it is powered by the body itself. The chip contains small amounts of copper and magnesium. After being ingested the chip will interact with digestive juices to produce a voltage that can be read from the surface of the skin through a detector patch, which then sends a signal via mobile phone to inform the doctor that the pill has been taken.

Sensors on the chip also detect heart rate and can estimate the patient’s amount of physical activity. It will allow doctors to better assess if a person is responding to a given dose, or if that dose needs to be adjusted.

It has been in clinical trials since 2009, but currently the FDA has only approved the chip for placebo pills, which were used in trials showing the chip to be safe and highly accurate. Proteus hopes to gain approval to use the digestible chip with other medicines. Andrew Thompson, chief executive of Proteus, says the chip has already been tested with treatments for tuberculosis, mental health, heart failure, hypertension, and diabetes.

The company is currently working with makers of metformin, a drug used to treat type 2 diabetes and the most commonly prescribed drug in the world. The company also plans on adding a wireless glucose meter to their device so that dosage amount and frequency can be correlated with changes in blood glucose levels.