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Earlier this year, physician Edward Greeno discovered that one of his patients had missed a dose of capecitabine, the oral chemotherapy drug he had prescribed to treat her colorectal cancer. But he didn’t find that out during one of her regular visits. Instead, he’d gotten a notification from an app that kept track of when she took her pills, based on data collected from the pills themselves.
Greeno, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, is heading up a pilot program offering orally administered capecitabine to colorectal cancer patients in partnership with Proteus Digital Health, a company that produces miniature sensing technology. Each pill contains one of the company’s sensors and can record when it’s ingested—a trick that Greeno and his collaborators are hoping will help doctors ensure that patients are taking their medication safely.
Capecitabine used to be available only as an intravenous ...
