Pharmacists at University of Minnesota Health are attaching digital sensors to chemotherapy pills to detect when cancer patients are forgetting or falling behind on tumor-killing medications.
So-called smart pills have been used to improve "medication adherence" for patients with heart problems or mental disorders, but the U became the first to test their effectiveness with oral chemotherapy.
The technology could significantly improve cancer care because the timing and dosage of chemotherapy is critical, said Dr. Edward Greeno, who directs the U's oncology service line.
"The therapy window — the difference between what's too much and too little — can be pretty narrow," he said. "You want to know [the drugs are] being given right."
Ingestible sensors are affixed to the pills, then send signals to receiver patches that patients wear on their bellies. The receivers send the drug-consumption information to patients' mobile phones and to doctors' medical records. The university has combined sensors with capecitabine chemo pills since September in a test project with pharmacists from Fairview Health and the manufacturer, California-based Proteus Digital Health.
Medication non-adherence is a problem in the United States: An estimated 50 percent of patients with chronic diseases don't take medications as prescribed. The IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics in 2013 estimated that improper and unnecessary medication use caused an additional $200 billion in annual U.S. health care costs.
Proteus' chief executive, Andrew Thompson, said the sensors are an affordable solution, though the company didn't disclose specific cost figures. The company first tried its federally approved sensors in combination with pills for schizophrenia, because of high rates of non-adherence in that patient population.
Then it added sensors to drugs for heart problems and infectious diseases, because researchers could quickly assess whether they improved short-term outcomes for patients with those conditions. Around 177,000 Proteus digital sensors have been swallowed with medication to date.