Wirelessly Powered Pills and Remote-Controlled Drugs, Usher in Electronic Medicine

Electronic medicine has been with us in the form of re-chargeable pacemakers and diabetic insulin pumps for a few years now, but the the newest frontier of healthcare is now offering us pills equipped with Wi-Fi transmitters, that are poised to change the future of pharmaceuticals fast and forever.

In 3 years the wireless pill has gone from a prototype powering itself for a week from inside a a person’s own stomach, using the stomach’s gastric acids the same way you can create a battery using a lemon, to powering itself for a month or more using “remote inductive charging”, which means powering devices at a distance wirelessly using remote antennas, which has not been approved for use by the FCC as yet.

And this year even before the human testing required for FDA-approval, the public marketing campaign for an electronic pill called SmartTab went mainstream, pre-selling and hyping the pharmacy of the future with statements like …

“If you walk into a pharmacy today, it looks pretty much the same as it did fifty to sixty years ago. All around us we have all of these developments in wireless technologies, digital technologies, but none of that had made its way to the pharmacy space. This industry is prime for change and our technology is the pharmacy of the future”.

Electronic Medicine, in the form of wireless pills, can do such things as recording core body temperature and other internal data, and then wirelessly beam the information to an external monitor, and also deliver drugs and real-time health monitoring from inside organs. The information is beamed, using the same frequencies as Bluetooth, to a receiver about 10 feet away, but Philip Nadeau, the electrical engineer who co-designed the device, suspects the signal could reach as far as 32 feet.

In 2017, Giovanni Traverso, a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said, Ingestible devices carry the longest-lasting, most potent energy harvester to date, at the time he co-led a study of one of the first electronic pills published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

MIT published an article a year later explaining how ingestible capsules, customized and printed on a 3D printer, can be controlled wirelessly by a smartphone, and can relay diagnostic information or release drugs in response to smartphone commands. These devices could also be used to communicate with other wearable and implantable medical devices, which could pool information to be communicated to the patient’s or doctor’s smartphone. “We’re really excited about the potential for gastric resident electronics to serve as platforms for mobile health to help patients remotely,” Traverso said, and the article pointed out that the research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

In 2020 Velóce Digital Health began promoting SmartTab, a capsule (pictured above, and in the video below) that works using several key technological features. The capsule itself is powered by inductive charging. Once swallowed, the capsule is tracked electronically using a small adhesive patch worn on the skin near the target area. When the capsule approaches the desired spot for administration, the contents can be released automatically or by the user by pushing some buttons on the accompanying iPhone app.

Plans are for SmartTab to make its debut for use in Crohn’s disease, but SmartTab’s CEO Robert Niichel is quick to point out more potential applications. Longer courses of antibiotics could be delivered using a single capsule that stays in the system for multiple days, releasing a set dose of antibiotics daily. Capsules that stay in the system for longer periods of time could also contain heart attack or epilepsy medications, Niichel says, with medication release triggered during symptom onset. And finally, drugs that are currently delivered as injections could be contained in a capsule, which could dock against the small intestine and deliver the drug painlessly.

In terms of cost, Niichel notes that the capsules are quite inexpensive: “You have many drugs out there that cost five, ten, twenty thousand dollars a year,” he says. “We’re talking about the smart capsule being less than a dollar per capsule.”

SmartTab has completed its animal pre-clinical studies and demonstrated that the pill could successfully release its contents at the targeted area upon receiving the wireless signal. The next step, says Niichel, is to begin human clinical studies in 2020 towards the goal of FDA approval.

References:

Photo: SmartTab (Manufacturer’s Photo)

https://www.marsdd.com/news/ingestibles-smart-pills-revolutionize-healthcare/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/device-harvests-energy-stomach-sends-wifi-updates

https://news.mit.edu/2018/ingestible-pill-controlled-wirelessly-bluetooth-1213