Swallow a Smart Pill

Over the last few decades, we’ve come to take for granted the immense range of medication at the disposal of modern doctors and pharmacists. Not surprisingly, it’s hard to know precisely how each one of us will react to prescribed medicines, unless there’s some prior knowledge of allergies or medical conditions. It’s the doctor’s job to say whether the pills work, but how much information is really at their disposal? How do they know what’s happening once you’ve downed the first pill?

California-based Proteus Biomedicals has spent a good deal of time finding an answer, as part of their Raisin System for measuring reaction to medications. It’s called an IEM, or Ingestible Event Marker, and it’s basically a silicon chip designed with integrated sensors and built from digestible compounds. The chip is literally good enough to eat, and it’s ready to be stamped down into any regular medication on the lab production line.

Once it’s out of the pill bottle and down your hatch, the ‘smart pill’ wizardry starts. The acids in your stomach activate a tiny chemical battery, and the IEM fires up its sensors and begins to monitor what the pill is doing to you – including any changes to your breathing rate, your heart rate and heart activity. It also registers as the quantity of medication delivered and notes down the precise time and date when it hit your system. Once its work is done, the IEM’s fantastic voyage ends when those same stomach acids easily reduce the chip to nothing.

All of the data from the IEM is sent from its miniscule transmitter to a patch worn on your skin, ready for download by digital devices – possibly including 3G phones, an application currently under development by US firm Qualcomm. Proteus believe that ‘smart pills’ equipped with their technology will provide doctors and patients with vastly increased information about how medication works in the body, and that derivative technologies could do even more to enhance drugs’ ability to combat illness.

As ever with Crystal Ball, we’re not talking ready for market just yet – the system still has to pass clinical trials and receive FDA approval in the US – but Proteus are optimistic about being able to deliver intelligent pills to our pharmacies by 2012. Unfortunately for Mensa hopefuls and game show contestants, intelligence pills are a long way further off - but there’ll always be regular flavoursome chips for consolation, even if the doctor disapproves.

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