- The Fantastic Voyage was
one of the first movies
to really introduce the
concept of miniaturizing
highly advanced technology,
which back in the 1960s was a submarine,
to small scales that could
easily traverse through your body
and access previous inaccessible regions.
Now, we've seen examples
like this in the media
such as in Ant Man or
the Magic School Bus,
but we've never really seen
anything come to fruition
that can be used clinically
and at this small size scale
with that much complexity.
The closest thing we
really have these days
is the capsule endoscope,
which functions just
like a regular endoscope,
but instead of being a tube
attached to a doctor's hand,
it's a capsules that a patient swallows
and autonomously travels
through your GI tract.
Now there's two primary challenges really,
or limitations that the capsule endoscope
doesn't really address.
So one of them is that
photographs only give
you so much information.
Now what we're trying
to do to address this,
is develop our own integrated system,
but instead of taking photographs,
collects biochemical information
based on reacting with specific
fluids in your GI tract.
And the way that we do this,
is by using specific sensors
with different coatings
for reacting with these
specific biomarkers,
and integrating this with
a microelectronic system,
the enables both multiplexing
for multiple types of
biochemical reactions,
but also wireless signal
transmission for external analysis.
Now the second primary limitation
of the capsule endoscope's approach,
is that it only takes pictures of regions
where it physically goes through.
And this makes it
difficult to assess regions
that are not directly a
part of your GI tract,
but are still essential
to digestive function.
Now what I'm referring to
specifically here is the pancreas.
Now the way that your pancreas interacts
with your small intestine
is via small tube
at the beginning, where it secretes fluids
consisting of enzymes
critical for digestion,
but also for neutralizing the acids
incoming from the stomach.
And so what we've done essentially
to target this fluid specifically
is use polymer coatings that
fill gratings in our capsule
and would dissolve at those
specific pH changing events,
so where the acid becomes neutral,
it dissolves at that point
and allows us to specifically interact
with that pancreatic secretion.
Now what's really nice
about this device concept,
is that not only can we
tailor the polymeric coatings
for dissolving at different
regions based on their pH,
but we can tailor
biochemical reactive sensors
to respond to different biomarkers
and possibly be applicable
to different conditions.
But the only other real limitation,
other than our own imagination
is ourselves as individuals
and the patients.
If we're willing to try new foods,
why not try eating some new technology?
