Now, a team led by Stanford electrical engineer H. Tom Soh and postdoctoral fellow Peter Mage has developed a drug delivery tool that could make it easier for people to get the correct dose of lifesaving drugs. In a paper published May 10 in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the group showed that the technology could continuously regulate the level of a chemotherapy drug in living animals.
"This is the first time anyone has been able to continuously control the drug levels in the body in real time," Soh said. "This is a novel concept with big implications because we believe we can adapt our technology to control the levels of a wide range of drugs."
Monitor and deliver
The new technology has three basic components: a real-time biosensor to continuously monitor drug levels in the bloodstream, a control system to calculate the right dose and a programmable pump that delivers just enough medicine to maintain a desired dose.
The sensor contains molecules called aptamers that are specially designed to bind a drug of interest. (These aptamers are a focus of Soh's lab.) When the drug is present in the bloodstream, the aptamer changes shape, which an electric sensor detects. The more drug, the more aptamers change shape.
(Reference: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170510115317.htm)