Nearly half of all chronically ill patients are responsible for numerous pills per day, which can cause confusion and failure to take their medication as directed. Additionally, patients typically forget to note not adhering to the specific drug to their physicians. This causes abnormalities in health that doctors physically cannot pinpoint from the brief time spent with each patient.
Enter Proteus Biomedical Inc. and its medicine intake technology, an ingestible sensor and personal physiologic monitoring system designed to help patients and caregivers keep track of their medicine regimens.
Proteus co-founder and chief medical officer Dr. George Savage, addressing Boston University’s 3rd Annual Future of Engineering Symposium Oct. 29, outlined the company’s nine-year research findings for the system, which won CE Mark approval in the European Union in August.
The intake monitoring system would eliminate superfluous costs currently associated with innovating new drugs to treat long-term illnesses, Savage said.
“It’s costing over $2 billion to get a new drug through development and regulators onto market, which is very expensive,” he said. “Many of these molecules are not a whole lot better than the old molecules.”
“Medicine and therapies that have been developed for acute illness don’t translate to chronic illness,” Savage said. “People keep working on drugs for better curing disease, but no one is working on helping what we already have.”
Instead of building new drugs, Redwood City, Calif.-based Proteus seeks to change the business model and helpfulness of the healthcare system by building an ingestible event marker, or IEM, into a given drug. The IEM is 300 microns thick, with added mineral layers that becomes powered when swallowed, sending a unique serial number when swallowed that identifies it with a private EKG to a patch the patient wears.
The patch, in turn, sends information about the medication — identifying factors such as the name of the drug, time of ingestion, and physiological response — into the cloud, which can then be accessed on any Internet-enabled device.
Monitoring the drug information and then sending a message out to a designated device would help patients keep better track of their medical history, Savage said. Patients could easily see a simple graphic of how they’re feeling, family members could access vital medical information, and doctor visits would prove more efficient and beneficial with this detailed physiological information, Savage said.
“We need a new business model that delivers outcomes, not chemicals,” he said.
The monitor patch, which the patient could wear for a week before discarding, would only cost $1 per day. The IEMs, when mass-produced on silica wafers, would cost mere pennies, Savage said.
“Family caregivers spend $705,000 year out-of-pocket to help loved ones,” he said. “No one includes them in the value proposition.”
Proteus employs more than 100 people to work on the research and development for the system, raising $115 million since the company’s inception in 2001 from financial investors and corporations.
Savage hopes to put the monitor system on the market by 2012. If all goes well, he sees promise in establishing his technology in developing countries to improve healthcare globally.
“The phone is the most powerful medical invention in the 21st century,” he said. “Instead of treating the developing world as a charity, it is much more sustainable to treat the developing world as a business.”
