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.