Pill senses when to release medicine

San Francisco Chronicle

Call it the “intelligent pill” — an amazing capsule that understands when your body needs medicine.

The Dutch electronics company Philips, a maker of webcams and cordless phones, has invented a battery-powered, programmable drug capsule it calls the “iPill.”

The multivitamin-size “intelligent pill” also has a microprocessor in it and is designed to release its cargo of medicine at the specific spot in the gastrointestinal tract (GI), where it will do the most good, sparing the rest of the body from unnecessary exposure to the drug.

So far it’s just a prototype, but Philips is talking to drug makers about using it on colon cancer and bowel inflammation.

The iPill has a wireless transmitter, but it plays no tunes. Instead, it sends dispatches about the temperature and acidity of its surroundings to an outside receiver as it travels through the GI tract over the course of a day or two. The acidity, measured by pH, of the gut decreases as the pill gets farther from the stomach, and that allows researchers to pinpoint the place where the drug is needed.

The plastic capsule contains a programmable microprocessor that turns on a miniature drug pump when the pH is right. The iPill can also receive signals from its outside controller.

Philips Research senior scientist Jeff Shimizu said the company is expanding its health-care business and saw a natural opportunity to use its electronics expertise to improve drug delivery. A “camera pill” pioneered by an Israeli company is already in use to spy around inside the gut and help doctors diagnose illnesses.

Though Philips’ smart pill is the same size as the camera pill — about an inch by a bit less than half an inch — Shimizu said the company may eventually be able to downsize the capsule by reducing its sensors to the scale of nanotechnology devices.