Harvard Students Design ChemoPatch for Cancer Treatments Outside the Hospital

First published on MedCityNews.com. If cancer treatment were cheaper and easier to administer, it would be more accessible to early-stage cancer patients across the world. That’s the reasoning behind a disposable, electronic chemotherapy patch designed by a bright group of undergrads at Harvard.

First published on MedCityNews.com. If cancer treatment were cheaper and easier to administer, it would be more accessible to early-stage cancer patients across the world. That’s the reasoning behind a disposable, electronic chemotherapy patch designed by a bright group of undergrads at Harvard.

The students, under the company name Theratech, just won a $20,000 cash prize from the Create the Future design contest sponsored by COMSOL, Tech Briefs Media Group and SAE International.

At the core of their ChemoPatch is a plastic-based micropump that they say could automatically deliver up to three different chemotherapy drugs in select doses at specific time intervals.

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Here’s how the team describes the four components of the patch in their submission:

1) a novel, patent-pending micropump for drug delivery
2) a drug reservoir that contains up to 3 separate chemotherapy drugs
3) a microneedle array for the painless administration of drugs
4) a simple microcontroller-based electronic circuit for complex programmable delivery scheduling

The current process for chemotherapy – delivered on a complex schedule from a pole-based IV pump – is part of what keeps it from being widely accessible for early-stage cancers, the team says. An automated, portable patch device could make it deliverable outside of the hospital setting.

Theratech says it’s planning to pilot the device, which has a production cost of $35 per unit, in early-stage breast cancer patients in India next year.

[Image credit: Theratech/Tech Briefs]