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Device-Activated Drugs, An Old Dog With Some New Tricks

 
• By Barnaby Pickering

As technologies move from the lab to commercialization, changes to them need to be made to make them financially and practically appropriate for clinical settings. In Vivo spoke to two companies pioneering new types of device-activated drugs to learn about these changes and how the end products will help patients.  

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Drugs that require energy delivery from devices to activate their effects are not new. Niels Ryberg Finsen received a Nobel prize for a light-activated skin cancer treatment in 1903, and the first FDA approved light-activated therapy came in 1993 as a treatment for bladder cancer.

So while not novel, the applications of drug-device pairings have been getting bolder. 

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