Edible electronic "smart pills" are coming to a pharmacy near you

Imagine a "smart pill" that has the power to identify where and when a drug should be released in the body. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but a professor at Carnegie Mellon University says we are almost there. He expects the devices to be tested on patients in the next five to 10 years.

In Trends in Biotechnology, the monthly review journal of applied biosciences, Christopher Bettinger presents his vision: the smart pills will be embedded with edible electronic sensors that could be powered by charged ions found in the gut. The only thing holding Bettinger back is the lack of electronic materials that are non-toxic within the body.

When Bettinger and his team began working on the project five years ago, they were proposing implantable, biodegradable devices, but their grant applications kept being rejected and the feedback was always the same: How will you implant it? How will you power it? The big drawback of injectable and implantable devices is that the body is very good at recognising something as a "foreign body" and secreting it quickly.

"We thought, how about we turn that challenge into an opportunity and instead of making it implantable we make it ingestible. And we'll solve the battery problem by designing a new material for the battery," says Bettinger, a professor in materials science and engineering.

The beauty of ingesting rather than implanting the device is that the body is designed to tolerate all sorts of things - just think of the things children swallow, and survive.

"The breakfast you had is made of materials that weren't probably FDA approved, but you are walking around just fine. Whereas you take those same materials and implant them, you may have a very different response.