Drug Delivery: MicroCHIPS in the Blood

Delivering drugs into our bodies is easier said than done.  Many new genomics-based drugs are large macro-molecular proteins that can be destroyed by stomach acids making delivery by pill impossible.  The American drug delivery market is over $20B, and with that much money at stake the power of capital to find a solution isn't far behind.  A recent delivery entry is an etched piece of silicon one-square centimeter that has a matrix of tiny wells, each designed to hold 150 nanoliters (billionths of a liter) of medicine.

"The ability to release drugs within the body in precise amounts at precise intervals will eventually be combined with the ability to measure drug levels (and the body's physiological responses to them) and then to broadcast the information to data-logging equipment outside the patient. When those three functions—drug release, response sensing and data transmission—are combined in an implantable device, physicians will, in effect, have an “intelligent agent” that can work amid the body's own tissues to do their bidding."

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