Project description
Patients may soon be able to monitor the drugs in their blood from home
Individuals utilise, metabolise and eliminate therapeutic drugs at different rates based on many factors. Further, the rate can be different in the same individual under different circumstances. For most drugs, it is not necessary to closely monitor the concentration of a drug in a patient’s bloodstream to ensure safe and effective dosing. However, for those with a narrow therapeutic range, meaning that small differences in dose or blood concentration can lead to serious therapeutic failures or adverse drug reactions, therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) is essential. Conventional TDM systems are very large, complex and expensive. The EU-funded THERA project is optimising a simple, cost-effective system the size of a smartphone capable of accurate TDM within minutes using a single drop of blood. It could revolutionise TDM as well as patient outcomes and quality of life.
Objective
Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) is an essential tool for measuring the circulating concentration of specific narrow therapeutic drugs at designated intervals, in order to maximise the efficacy of the drug and avoid toxicity and adverse drug reactions. TDM is currently available only in central laboratories or large hospitals, and several barriers prevent its wide implementation in routine clinical practice. First, current technologies used for TDM (e.g. high-performance liquid chromatography – HPLC, mass spectrometry – MS) are exclusively used in central laboratories due to their cost, system size and weight, complexity of use and maintenance requirements. Second, alternative technologies (e.g. ELISA immunoassays) are analyte-specific and do not allow adaptability to new analytes (increasing costs). We verified the feasibility and clinical utility of using Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) for TDM using real plasma samples taken from de-identified patients. Importantly, our measurements were consistent with state-of-the-art data generated by LC-MS/MS. We already have experimentally shown a 0.1 μM detection limit on pure, artificial samples. Within THERA, we aim to transform our research output into a commercially-relevant (in terms of size, throughput, user friendliness and cost) product by creating a minimum viable product that will enable TDM for a wide variety of molecules. Our goal within this project is to validate this device on clinical samples and build a strong business case for it that will enable commercial exploitation. THERA will advance our SERS-based device from a current technology readiness level of 3 to 5/6. Our value proposition is a tabletop, miniaturized (smartphone-sized) device that can perform TDM on a single droplet of blood, in a matter of minutes, without the need for specialized personnel, at a fraction of the cost currently associated with TDM.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-POC-LS - ERC Proof of Concept Lump Sum PilotHost institution
2800 Kongens Lyngby
Denmark