personalized treatment를 위한 smart watch-drug concentration sensor

Engineers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and their colleagues at Stanford School of Medicine have demonstrated that drug levels inside the body can be tracked in real time using a custom smartwatch that analyzes the chemicals found in sweat. 

In general, medications are prescribed with a 'one-size-fits-all' approach—drugs are designed and prescribed based on statistical averages of their effectiveness. There are guidelines for factors such as patients' weight and age. But in addition to these basic differentiators, our body chemistry constantly changes—depending on what we eat and how much we've exercised. And on top of these dynamic factors, every individual's genetic makeup is unique and hence responses to medications can vary. This affects how fast drugs are absorbed, take effect and get eliminated from an individual.

According to the researchers, current efforts to personalize the drug dosage rely heavily on repeated blood draws at the hospital. The samples are then sent out to be analyzed in central labs. These solutions are inconvenient, time-consuming, invasive and expensive. That is why they are only performed on a small subset of patients and on rare occasions.

Because of their small molecular sizes, many different kinds of drugs end up in sweat, where their concentrations closely reflect the drugs' circulating levels. That's why the researchers created a smartwatch, equipped with a sensor that analyzes the sampled tiny droplets of sweat.

The team's experiment tracked the effect of acetaminophen, a common over-the-counter pain medication, on individuals over the period of a few hours. First, the researchers stimulated sweat glands on the wrist by applying a small electric current, the same technique that Emaminejad's research group demonstrated in previous wearable technologies.

This allowed the researchers to detect changes in body chemistry, without needing subjects to work up a sweat by exercising. As different drugs each have their own unique electrochemical signature, the sensor can be designed to look for the level of a particular medication at any given time.

What makes this study significant is the ability to accurately detect a drug's unique electrochemical signal, against the backdrop of signals from many other molecules that may be circulating in the body and in higher concentrations than the drug

 

 

reference

Shuyu Lin et al, Noninvasive wearable electroactive pharmaceutical monitoring for personalized therapeutics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2009979117

Noninvasive wearable electroactive pharmaceutical monitoring for personalized therapeutics