Their ultimate aim is to eliminate the need for such invasive and painful methodologies as gastroscopy and colonoscopy, but they can also meet the growing demand for telemedicine and e-health. In fact, smart pills were as well designed to keep a patient’s compliance under control, especially when it comes to prescriptions and therapies for the chronic diseases’ treatment. «The smart pills industry is likely to experience a burst of new products in the next five to seven years», Technical Insights research analyst Bhargav Rajan stated, «offering tremendous potential for collaboration between the industry and academia. While overarching product designs developed by the industry can lead to breakthrough products such as capsule endoscopes, it is by leveraging ideas from basic and applied sciences at universities and research centers», he said, «that product differentiation and value enhancement can be achieved». But whilst waiting for further developments to come, the industry is already gearing up to face the new challenges by offering medical institutions and professionals worldwide a portfolio of solutions that have proved themselves to be not only cheaper but also more effective than the traditional ones.
Around the human body in eight hours
No doubt one of the top notch players in the arena is the Israel-based Given Images, who developed a system poised to replace the uncomfortable colonoscopy technologies, addressed to discover evidences of tumors, irritable bowel syndrome or Ibs; finally the Crohn’s disease. As reported in June, the company has received the Us Food and drugs administration’s approval for the recently released PillCam Colon 2, part of the PillCam family. It is an ingestible pill-sized video camera (with a 11.6×31.5 millimeters silhouette) that whenever swallowed by a patient can capture color footage of his/her inner organs, to immediately send them to a wireless device the person can wear. The whole journey throughout a human body can only last between eight and ten hours allegedly and the two Cmos (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) placed at either end of the pill can detect objects as small as 0.7 millimeters, recording an average 30 thousand images at least. After accomplishing its duty the pill passes through the body in a two-day time and whilst a common colonoscopy procedure could cost up to 4,500 Us dollars; the Given Images solution would only be 650 dollar worth. According to the company’s vice president of global market development for capsule endoscopy Gregory Davault «PillCam Colon 2 is the only minimally invasive tool that offers direct visualization of the colon at low risk and high accuracy. It does not require any sedation», as Gregory Davault told the Uk-based online newsmagazine Newselectronic, «which means that patients can still carry on with their normal day, and that their recovery is immediate». Given Images was acquired last February by the Irish device manufacturer Covidien in a 850 million dollars deal, proving there is a huge potential market out there for this kind of solutions. Sources reported how the PillCam portfolio’s capabilities were also praised by such specialists as the gastroenterologist and professor of medicine at the Indiana State university Douglas Kevin Rex: «I think that there is going to be a real demand for this», professor Douglas Rex pointed out in a video that also appeared on The Denver Post’s website, «and although they are occasional cases, we look at this as to a very good way to evaluate some portions of the colon that we still haven’t seen».
Aiming at compliance
Referring to the smart pills’ scenario Frost & Sullivan’s Technical insight also stressed the fact that «being a nascent market there is a need to build confidence among the stakeholders: patients, physicians, researchers, investors and regulatory agencies» and thus that «measures like strategic and business partnerships as well as scientific and clinical education will help win the trust of regulatory authorities, investors and users». Cooperation between device and drug manufacturers on the one hand; and universities or research centers on the other might be crucial, according to observers. And in addition, if «smaller companies cannot effectively translate a technology into a commercial product», nonetheless they can «explore licensing them to companies with established solutions in the market», as research analyst Bhargav Rajan considered, while «new market participants can rely on technology incubators to ease their technology towards commercialization». A sensor called Helius applied on the Diovan capsules is Proteus Digital Health’s killer-app in the smart pills arena. Headquartered in Redwood, California, the company is participated by such giants as Novartis, that invested 24 million dollars in a licensing and cooperation agreement, Otsuka and Sino Portfolio. Recently, the firm has announced it has raised some 120 million dollars from a bunch of «institutional investors based in the United States, Asia and Europe» to boost its research on the new frontier of diagnostic focusing on the compliance side. Proteus’s goal is to provide a complete platform for medication management and adherence based on chip or sensor-equipped pills, an intelligent biometric wearable patch and smartphones. Leveraging the evidences recorded by the pill the whole architecture can track a number of parameters like sleep patterns, heart beat rate, body temperature. As tiny as a pinpoint, the smart pill is also cheap, since each chip or sensor would only cost some 50 cents, according to sources, and has already proven to be successful. The compliance rate of patients involved in a test by Novartis surged from 30 to 80 percentage points. Proteus Digital Health is now planning to open new facilities in Great Britain, where a 200 people workforce is allegedly to be hired, thanks to the partnership that the Californian manufacturer has established with the national ministry of Health and a handful of universities and research centers, such as the Oxford university, the Eastern Academic and the Oxford Academic science networks.