TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH:
Engineer-clinician collaborations yield innovative,
applied solutions
Funded via the W.H. Coulter
Translational Research Partnership in Biomedical Engineering,
these research projects recently concluded in year one of the
partnership. This partnership fosters early-stage collaborations
between University of Wisconsin biomedical engineering researchers
and practicing physicians that will enable researchers to deliver
their advances more quickly to patients.
|
Medicine, hand-delivered
child’s life is filled with bumps and bruises,
and scrapes and cuts—most of which require little more than a
thorough cleansing and a bandage. But for a child with hemophilia, even
the slightest bump or scrape can trigger a bleeding episode that often
ends in a lengthy, anguishing emergency room ordeal. There, the medical
staff ultimately injects a clotting factor that circulates through the
child’s bloodstream and helps to stop the bleeding. “The
child is traumatized, family is traumatized, staff is traumatized and
lots of resources have been used,” says Associate Professor of
Pediatrics Carol Diamond.
After a few such experiences, she says, parents generally
choose the only other alternative: administering the clotting factor
at home via a surgically inserted catheter, or port, which opens the
body to infection.
Now, however, Diamond, Professor David
Beebe and engineer Ben Moga have developed
a third option—one that places the power to stop bleeding episodes
right in the palm of a child’s hand.
About the size of a poker chip, their disposable device
is a cross between a miniature drug pump and a patch. They can configure
it to contain a single, tiny needle or a series of microneedles—and
they can control whether it delivers the clotting factor in just a few
minutes or over several hours.
“What’s so exciting about this drug-delivery
device is that, first of all, it will allow a family to administer a
drug immediately in their home—safely,” says Diamond. “It
is something that can be used in a prophylactic manner—so, at
regular intervals, preventatively—for a child. It’s something
even for an older child, if they knew they were going to play rigorously,
like in a soccer game, they could infuse at home with this device—without
intravenous access, without an in-dwelling catheter. This will dramatically
improve the patient’s quality of life.”
In its device, the group harnessed the non-electronic
power of stimuli-responsive hydrogels, which expand or contract in response
to temperature or pH changes in their environment. In a tiny package,
the device has a drum reservoir on the bottom and “swellable”
hydrogels on top—a concept former Beebe grad student Dave
Eddington first demonstrated a few years ago. “Triggering
the response of these hydrogels by exposing them to a change in pH,
for example, in the solution, would then expand the volume of the hydrogels
and simply push the drug out,” says Beebe. He calls the device
a platform technology and says the group has demonstrated that it works
for closed-loop regulation, making closed-loop delivery—the holy
grail of drug delivery—a possibility. Currently, the researchers
are conducting animal studies with a bolus delivery prototype and will
continue to refine the device for sustained delivery.
In a market that includes mini transdermal pumps,
IV injection, infusion pumps, needles or syringes, needleless injections
and inhalers, says Beebe, there is high demand for this low-cost drug-delivery
system. “There is a growing market for devices that can use sustained
delivery on large-protein drugs, so we envision that this might be technology
licensed widely to pharmaceutical companies,” says Beebe.
