It’s an age old concern in the medical community, one that touches many of us. How do doctors insure that important, yet potentially dangerous medications get into a patient’s system in exactly the right amount and at precisely the right time?
Some UC Santa Barbara researchers think they have a new answer to that old problem.
"It started with the problem in pharmacology of trying to target drugs in the blood between or above the therapeutic level of drug, but below the toxic level of the drug," said UCSB Researcher Willus Fisher. He's been looking at the issue with fellow doctoral student Aria Ghasemizadeh.
"We call that the therapeutic window. We are always trying to achieve that," said Fisher, "You can do that with varying degrees, depending on what kind of delivery system you are using. As it stands, the ones that can do it the best are inconvenient, like the IV pump, which achieve a very controlled dosing of drugs into the body, Of course, that requires you are hooked up to an IV."
Pills are a solution with some medications. But, because they have to go through the digestive system, it’s hard to know how much of the drug actually gets into the blood stream. And, there’s no way to control the concentration when it arrives.
The imprecision can not only reduce the effectiveness of some medications, Fisher said it can actually be dangerous.
"Patients are injured at a rate of about 1.3 million a year," said Fisher. "There are about 9000 recorded deaths as a result of dosing errors, and it costs the health care industry about $40 billion each year,"
The two researchers think they’ve come up with an answer. It uses existing technology to in effect remotely control the release of drugs prepositioned in a patient.
"Aria had come up with a way of taking nanoparticles, and entrapping drugs in them. He envisioned a way to actually release those drugs on demand," said Fisher. He said it involved using a device outside of the human body to control the release.
Aria had thought about using the approach to help soldiers in the field, but Fisher said he saw the potential to use it to help members of the general public with their medications.
He said the basic technology for using the small, wearable devices for drug deployment exists now, but that it needs to be fine tuned and extensively tested.
The researchers recently received a grant to set up a lab, and start testing. Fisher says interest, and financial support from potential corporate partners is key. He thinks it could be ready for everyday use in six to eight years.
