Rice University is part of a research team developing an implant designed to improve adherence to obesity and type 2 diabetes drugs.
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The implant called ROGUE (Rx on-site generation using electronics) is about the size of the tip of a finger and it’s designed to function as a “living pharmacy” making drugs accessible in the body on demand.
“With this platform, we hope that we can reduce the cost of goods to less than $1,000 per year and be able to pass a lot of that savings on to the consumer and to the health care system overall,” explained Omid Veiseh, Professor of Bioengineering and Faculty Director of the Rice Biotech Launch Pad.
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Right now, patients pay about 12 times that cost for weight loss drugs. Last week, Novo Nordisk went before Congress to discuss why Americans are paying so much for drugs like Ozempic. The company made no plans to lower the cost.
Meanwhile, Veiseh says the ROGUE technology is designed for rapid and cost-effective deployment via a minimally invasive procedure in an outpatient clinic. Then patients and physicians can monitor and adjust drug dosing once this is inside.
“It will communicate with an app that would be, you know, put on your iPhone or your iWatch or any other smartphone, and what that allows the clinician, the patient to do is to monitor and regulate how much drug is produced on every hour basis,” Veiseh said. “So, rather than current therapies where you sort of administer a large dose to begin with just to have coverage for the whole week. That creates a lot of the side effects and issues like that. This is going to be a much more fine-tuned to the patient’s needs and regulated via an app.”
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Within five years, Veiseh plans to begin using this in patients and eliminate the biggest issues with weight loss drugs.
“Our vision is if we can create a device that can house these cells and enable their control, we can safely deploy this into patients, reduce cost, improve compliance, and really increase the accessibility of these really effective drugs for a lot more patients,” Veiseh said.