It’s no secret that prescription drug abuse is a huge problem all around the world. The most-often abused medications are powerful painkillers, which are easy enough to misuse due to the way they’re distributed. They come in little plastic bottles, usually with a month’s worth of pills at a time. The patient can easily take more than the prescribed dose or just sell their pills to someone else.

Engineering students at Johns Hopkins University were asked to come up with a better solution that would make pill dispensation safer for the patient. They invented a tamper-resistant pill dispenser that only dispenses the correct dose at the correct time to the correct person – this is ensured with a built-in fingerprint scanner programmed right at the pharmacy. The very tough steel alloy that forms the body of the dispenser is resistant to hammers, drills, and other methods used to try to break it open.

Only a pharmacist can open the dispenser with a special key – a key which only the pharmacist has access to. The students and faculty at Johns Hopkins are still developing the technology and hope to receive a grant from the National Institutes of Health in order to continue their research and hopefully commercialize the dispenser in the future. Will it entirely prevent prescription abuse? Probably not. But at least the special dispenser will make patients more aware of the proper dosage and stop others from stealing their pills.

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Itty-bitty cameras that can be swallowed can give doctors a pretty great view of what’s going on inside a body, but could the next generation of swallowed medical devices be ones that contain both digestible material and cutting-edge electronic medical treatments? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are working on devices that contain non-toxic biochemical batteries which could be deployed to do all sorts of amazing things like stimulating damaged tissues or targeting drug delivery – and they’re no bigger than a regular pill.

Using the non-toxic battery developed by professor Jay Whitacre, electronics could be folded up into standard size gelatin capsules. The capsules would be naturally broken down in the digestive system and the newly-exposed electronics an their batteries would be activated by moisture. The device could then do whatever it was meant to do and pass safely through the digestive system in 18 to 24 hours. A new pill could be taken every day if necessary, with no ill effects. The future of medical testing and treatment could very well lie in these futuristic biocompatible edible devices.

The post Incredible Edible Meds: Safe Electronic Devices in Pill Form first appeared on Gajitz.

There is probably no one in the world who really enjoys taking pills, but for a lot of us they’re a necessary evil. They’re also notoriously difficult to keep track of, with around 1.3 million people suffering some sort of injury from “medication errors” every year in the U.S. alone.

A Kickstarter project called CapsulePen will take the guesswork and much of the patient error out of the process of taking daily medications. Each capsule holds that day’s pills lengthwise, kind of like a pen-shaped version of those weekly pill boxes. You load your pills so that they come out in the order in which they need to be taken, further reducing the chance of user error.

The hexagonal CapsulePens are designed to easily bundle together so that you can carry one for each day of the week. The end of each tube is conveniently labeled with the day of the week. Little clips let them attach to pockets, just like ink pens. The magnetized containers can even be hung on the fridge or a filing cabinet to keep your pills in easy reach. CapsulePens might not be right for people who have tons of medications to take every day, but for the average younger, healthy person, the seven-pill capacity of each tube should be enough.

The post Cool Next-Gen Pill Bottle Destigmatizes Daily Medicine Taking first appeared on Gajitz.

No matter how old you get, seeing the doctor pull out a giant hypodermic needle and aim it at you is enough to give anyone the temporary terrors. The medical community has been working on alternative delivery methods for medicines for quite a while now, and it looks like microneedles are the front-runners. These painless little patches of tiny needles deliver medicines as easily as putting on an adhesive bandage, leaving behind none of the hazardous bio-waste created by hypodermic needles. A research team at Tufts University has taken the microneedle concept and moved it one step further by creating the tiny needles out of a type of silk.

According to the bioengineers behind the project, it can be very difficult to manufacture effective microneedles with current procedures. The pharmaceuticals meant to be delivered by the system can often be destroyed by harsh manufacturing conditions and then fail to be released in the patient’s body in a controlled and effective way. But the biomaterial silk fibroin is an ideal answer to these problems, offering an easy way to alter the rate of delivery and lowering the risk of infection (over conventional microneedle production methods). One huge benefit microneedles have over traditional hypodermic needle-delivered drugs is that they don’t require refrigeration, making them more stable for delivery to remote areas.

The post Tiny Silk Microneedles Deliver Meds Better Than Syringes first appeared on Gajitz.