Drug-delivery chips

MOST people like to draw a strict line between man and machine. But these days the human body, if necessary, can be chock full of gadgets. Pacemakers, artificial hips (though hopefully not the ASRs made by DePuy), stents and pain pumps (which deliver painkillers directly into the spine)—all can make an ailing body feel healthy once more. Your correspondent’s fiancé has a titanium-reinforced spine and can wallop any foe on the tennis court. Given all this, the concept of an implanted drug device seems simple enough.

But it was not until this week, more than a decade after work on the product began, that one set of inventors began to see the fruits of their labour. In a paper published online on Thursday in Science Translational Medicine, Robert Farra and his colleagues described the first clinical trial of an implanted microchip that delivers medicine. Dr Farra is the president of the aptly named MicroCHIPS, a firm in Massachusetts that hopes to transform the way that patients receive drugs. Many patients fail to take their medicine as prescribed, a problem that will grow worse as chronic disease becomes more common. An implanted device would ensure that delinquent patients take their medicine without even realising it.

In this first trial, Dr Farra tested microchips in eight women with osteoporosis. Each chip had 20 tiny reservoirs filled with a drug usually delivered by injection. Each reservoir was covered with a thin membrane that would melt when an electric current was applied, releasing the drug into the body. The idea was to wirelessly program the chip to release a dose from one reservoir each day for 20 days. Implanted in each woman’s abdomen, the foreign gadget prompted the body to form a fibrous capsule around it. But the chip nevertheless seemed to work, releasing the drugs, which then penetrated the capsule and moved into the bloodstream.

The trial was not all good news. The chip failed in one patient. And there remains much more work before the chip can come to market. To be useful to practicing doctors, such chips must hold many more doses—Dr Farra wants to have 365. MicroCHIPS will not seek regulatory approval in America until 2014. There will surely be setbacks. But this week’s news, at least, was a step in the right direction.