A future with wireless systems to track tumours and dispense drugs

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are working on less invasive and cheaper medical processes to replace the current invasive methods employed during medical investigations and operations. They are working on a system called ReMix, a GPS for the body that can use wireless signals to locate ingestible implants inside the body. Rather than requiring an energy source, it uses a diode to mix then separate other signals that might get in the way, and then reflects a signal transmitted from outside of the body. Current experiments have enabled the team to pinpoint implants to the nearest centimetre, and they hope this will lead eventually to drug delivery to s specific part of the body.
Romit Roy Choudhury, electrical engineering and computer science professor at the University of Illinois, said: “The ability to continuously sense inside the human body has largely been a distant dream. One of the roadblocks has been wireless communication to a device and its continuous localization. ReMix makes a leap in this direction by showing that the wireless component of implantable devices may no longer be the bottleneck.”
PhD student Deepak Vasisht, lead author, said: “We want a model that’s technically feasible, while still complex enough to accurately represent the human body. If we want to use this technology on actual cancer patients one day, it will have to come from better modelling a person’s physical structure. One reason that [proton therapy] is so expensive is because of the cost of installing the hardware. If these systems can encourage more applications of the technology, there will be more demand, which will mean more therapy centres, and lower prices for patients.”