Microchip implant delivers bone drug

Some drugs don’t work in pills, but patients hate injections. How about an alternative?

In a medical first, researchers reported that they’ve been able to deliver bone-building drugs to seven osteoporosis patients with a novel microchip implant.

The microchips worked inside patients as drug-delivering pacemakers, following a prescription plan sent by radio signal.

“This is equivalent to an injection without the pain or trouble,” says study lead author Robert Farra of MICROCHIPS Inc., of Waltham, Mass., which makes the devices. Farra and colleagues presented the study, a safety trial of the devices, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Vancouver. The work also appears in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Overall, surveys suggest only about half of all patients fully follow prescription plans for all drugs. Only about 25 per cent of the 50,000 osteoporosis patients in the U.S. who now take the implant trial hormone — which requires injections, refrigeration and can cost about $10,000 a year — continue taking it for the full two-year course.

“This is a really interesting delivery system, one that has some real potential,” says osteoporosis expert E. Michael Lewiecki of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque, who was not part of the study.

In the study, conducted in Denmark, surgeons implanted the microchips in the abdomens of seven women aged 65 to 70, in a 30-minute office surgery. Later, the implants received signals that released doses of the drug from microscopic reservoirs etched in the chip for up to 20 days.

Doctors measured the drug’s effects in blood samples, finding them similar to regular injections. Reassuringly, a collagen layer that grew to surround the implants didn’t block the drugs from reaching the bloodstream.

“Our next goal is for a chip that can deliver daily doses for 365 days,” Farra says. If successful, the implants would receive federal approval for medical use after 2016. The implants would likely cost as much as injections.