NEW YORK, July 15 (UPI) -- Microchip-loaded, intelligent pills soon could be used to diagnose a patient's condition after being swallowed and compute the best, safest amount of drugs to treat diseases. Their inventors say the iPills, as the devices are called, could become lifesavers in emergency situations, dispensing precise doses of medication even when doctors are unavailable.
The iPills also could be programmed to release drugs precisely in complicated schedules, an ability of critical importance for diseases such as cancer or AIDS, where cocktails of many different medications often are required at constant intervals.
"They could cost maybe around 10 to 20 cents a pill," said electrical engineer Wael Badawy of the University of Calgary in Canada. "Instead of taking many pills at certain times, with the iPill, you could adjust the timer so you could swallow them all at once and get right doses at the right times," Badawy said.
Pills are preferred by far over injections by patients. Injected drugs in liquid form tend to be more difficult to store and keep sterile than pills. But conventional pills can be dispensed only in preset doses, while people come in all sizes. Patients could need higher or lower doses of a medicine depending on several factors, such as body weight and severity of their condition.
In addition, when medical emergencies occur in remote areas, patients may find themselves from from their doctors, who know how much of a drug they might need.
"If you have a rural area, like we have in northern Canada, we don't have immediate medical assistance (because) the area (is) too large and decentralized," Badawy said. "Or, if you go to the tropics, where it can be very hot, obviously you may think you have a fever when you don't and swallow pills that can harm your liver or kidneys."
Scientists worldwide are working on new plastics for drug capsules to meter out doses at scheduled rates or based on body chemistry.
"Most scientists looking into drug delivery systems are doctors or chemists, not engineers. They're not familiar with how mature electronics have grown," Badawy said. "Why not do it with microelectronics?"
Badawy and his team invented and tested a prototype, disk-shaped iPill the size of a penny and loaded with sensors, drugs and pumps. Its electronic components fit on 400 square micrometers, a space smaller than the area of 10 blood cells.
The prototype's core contains an ARM VII microprocessor, a high-performance chip from Advanced RISC Machines, an international computer giant. Badawy explained one chip was as powerful as a PC 286 desktop computer, IBM's mid-1980s vintage, "but consumes one-tenth the power."
The silicon-oxide-based sensors monitor aspects of body chemistry, such as pH or acidity levels. Based on the electrical input from the sensors, the microchip can read how severe an illness is. By comparing these readings against its artificial intelligence programming, the chip then controls the micropumps, squeezing a computed dose of drug outwards. The entire system is powered by super-capacitors, layers of metal that store up to six hours worth of power.
The iPill is not biodegradable. "It will come out in the bathroom," Badawy said.
The prototype cost about $730,000. "The actual ARM VII chip itself is about ($365,000)," Badaway said. Still, he expects that upon mass production, each iPill should cost only pennies. "Initially, it cost Pentium about $10 million to run the first prototype, and then each chip was sold at about $100. When sold in volume, it will not be that expensive," he added.
"In principle, it could be very inexpensive," said Michael Simpson, a nanobiotechnologist who leads the molecular scale engineering research group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. "Once, in order to get the kind of computing power we have now, it would have cost an enormous amount of money. Now we carry around in a laptop what used to be considered a supercomputer," Simpson said.
Still, the iPill has a number of kinks the inventors must work out. The device can store only 1 milliliter or so of drugs in its internal reservoir. "You want to keep the pill a size where you want it swallowable," Badawy said. He suggested packing the pill with more potent drugs, or simply taking more than one iPill.
Badawy said he expects the iPill could be available for animal testing within a year or two, and a product approved for human use in four to five years. So far the researchers have not tested the device on people, but rather have tried immersing it in vats of varying acidities to see if it would release the appropriate amounts of drugs.
The researchers also are designing new iPills loaded with sensors to monitor body temperature and blood pressure. They are even considering multiple-pill systems that can communicate with one another wirelessly, to coordinate drug delivery.
Until iPills are ready for human use, however, Badawy said the devices could enhance drug research in lab settings. Scientists testing new compounds on animals want to see which dose levels are safest and most effective, and which are risky.
"With an iPill, you don't have to inject an animal every two hours or so with a small dose. You can record body temperature and blood pressure and any symptoms with gradual release of drugs," Badawy said. "This is the current focus we have for investors to back up this project for commercialization."
Such technology could prove a real boost for the field of microelectronic mechanical systems, or MEMS, Simpson said. "When we can have an application like this see what's happening to molecular processes, then we could have an explosion in the field," he suggested.
