Four undergraduates from Harvard invented a method to administer early stage chemotherapy through a patch. This method is intended to allow patients to self administer their medicine away from the hospital setting.
Nikhil Mehandru, Aaron Perez, Alydaar Rangwala, and Brandon K. Sim began working on the project during their freshman year of engineering courses. The students formed a multidisciplinary team representing applied mathematics, physics, electrical engineering and biomedical engineering.
http://contest.techbriefs.com/2013/entries/medical/3974
More than half of new cancer cases in 2011 occurred in developing countries, and 8.6 million cancer deaths happened worldwide. The team wanted to find a cost-effective method to implement simple cancer treatment across the world.
The product had to be low cost, disposable and simple. Automated so that it could be used by patients in their home but effective enough to help patients in early state chemotherapy. Iontophoretic electronic technology was the method used by the team to deliver the drugs. The technique was introduced in early 2000 but did not reach wide use.
Two problems with iontophoretic delivery were that only one drug at a time could be delivered, and the drugs needed reformulation to be stored in the patch body. The technical details are patent pending, but the team developed the ChemoPatch to dispense up to three different drugs with preprogrammed doses at set times. Additionally the drugs are delivered as is without the need for a chemical change.
After countless hours in the lab Mehandru and his cohorts developed the micropump to deliver the drugs along with a specialized reservoir, a microneedle array and an electronic control unit. The micropump is fully plastic, allowing the unit to be thrown away after use.
In late 2013 the ChemoPatch won second prize at the Collegiate Inventors Competition in the undergraduate division and the Grand Prize in the Tech Briefs Create the Future Design Contest. The project has a long way to go before production can be realized but the new approach to drug delivery is fantastic.