- Title: SWITZERLAND: Tiny lab under the skin could stop drug cheats
- Date: 18th July 2013
- Summary: PARIS, FRANCE (FILE - JULY 25, 2004) (REUTERS) LANCE ARMSTRONG ON PODIUM, WEARING YELLOW JERSEY
- Embargoed: 2nd August 2013 13:00
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- Location: Switzerland
- Country: Switzerland
- Topics: Sports
- Reuters ID: LVA7H6K3TCWBB0HILW3IMNF4TWS2
- Story Text: A tiny, portable, personal blood testing laboratory implanted under the skin has been devised by Swiss-based scientists. The prototype device, called IronIC chip, is just a few cubic millimetres in volume but includes seven sensors, a radio transmitter and a power delivery system. Outside the body, a battery patch provides one-tenth of a watt of power, through the patient's skin. The device can stay under the skin while the battery is replaced.
The team at Swiss technology institute EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne), led by scientists Giovanni de Micheli and Sandro Carrara, say the device could provide an immediate analysis of substances in the body, transmitted via smartphone to a doctor over the cellular network. This feat of miniaturisation has many potential applications, including monitoring patients undergoing chemotherapy, and even providing continuous drug testing of professional athletes.
Humans manufacture thousands of substances and transport them, via the blood, through the body. Some of these substances can be used as indicators of health status. So far the device has been able to detect several drugs and disease biomarkers in mice, transmitting the results in real time. The team say that in laboratory tests the prototype proved as reliable as traditional analysis methods.
The implant provides a magnetic link over a safe frequency as the patch collects data via a miniscule electrical coil. The data is then transmitted by Bluetooth to a mobile phone, which sends them to the doctor over the cellular network.
PhD student Jacobo Olivo says the battery in the flexible patch should be placed over the skin, close to the implanted device, "to reduce the discomfort of the patients this....actually there is no battery embedded. So we have to provide power to the sensor in order to make it function.....what we designed is a patch that can be placed exactly over the implantation zone. It's flexible, so it can be placed in a different part of the body and is battery powered and it can transmit power to the implanted sensors using an inductive link," said Olivo.
"The patch is equipped with a Bluetooth model, so actually we can control the patch from far away using an Android application that we have designed running on smartphone or tablets," he added.
In medical applications, the researchers say the method will allow a far more personalised level of care than traditional blood tests can provide. Health care providers will be better able to monitor patients, particularly those with chronic illness or those undergoing chemotherapy. Currently, oncologists use occasional blood tests to evaluate their patients' tolerance of a particular chemotherapy treatment dosage. In these conditions, it's difficult to administer the optimal dose.
"It can also host the detection of drugs that should be useful in order to adjust the cure, the pharmacological cure to the patient. Typical example is chemotherapetic compounds, which are highly toxic, and then to have an online monitoring of the amount of the compounds into the blood. Should be extremely important in order for the oncologists, in order to tune the cure for that particular patient," said Carrara.
To capture the targeted substance in the body each sensor's surface is covered with an enzyme. The team believe they could potentially detect many chemical substances, with major implications in diagnostics. Carrara says that, in some cases, the enzymes can last for a year within the body before the device needs changing.
In patients with chronic illness, the implants could send alerts even before symptoms emerge, and anticipate the need for medication.
Although the substances discovered by the sensors so far have been anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory compounds, Carrara believes with further research it would be possible to use the device to detect banned substances in the blood of professional athletes. Carrara says the Swiss Laboratory for Anti-Doping Analyses in Lausanne have already expressed interest in exploiting his team's technology.
"I had a recent discussion with the federal office for anti-doping actions (Swiss Laboratory for Anti-Doping Analyses) and they are developing this idea of the biological passport or any individual sportsman and they forecast that in ten years from now to have all the sportsmen to be obliged to have under the skin, in a kind of similar technology in order to have the possibility to follow in a continuous manner the metabolic baseline parameters of each sportsman," said Carrara.
And with yet another sports-related drug- scandal making headlines, anti-doping authorites are eager to find solutions. Leading Jamaican athletes, former world 100 metres record-holder Asafa Powell and Olympic 4x100 metres relay silver medallist Sherone Simpson are being investigated after testing positive for the banned stimulant oxilophine.
Athletics and cycling have both suffered a series of drug-related scandals in recent years. Last year US cyclist Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles before eventually admitting persistent drug infringments.
The project brought together electronics experts, computer scientists, doctors and biologists from EPFL, the Istituto di Ricerca di Bellinzona, EMPA and ETHZ. It is part of the Swiss Nano-Tera program, whose goal is to encourage interdisciplinary research in the environmental and medical fields. Researchers hope the technology will be commercially available within four years, following human testing. - Copyright Holder: FILE REUTERS (CAN SELL)
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