Simple patch can make medications safer and more effective featuring Nutromics
UNSW researchers have helped design a simple, wearable patch to give clinicians up-to-the-minute readouts of a medication’s levels in the body, offering a new era of precision dosing.
Vancomycin is the antibiotic doctors reach for when almost nothing else will work. It’s used in hospitals for serious drug-resistant infections, or for when an infection is spreading through the patient’s bloodstream. It’s commonly used in hospitals around the world, but it’s also notoriously tricky to dose: too little and it won’t knock out the infection, too much and the patient risks kidney damage or even death. Right now, dosage levels are monitored by repeated blood tests, an invasive and time-consuming process that can’t always give clinicians the data they need in time. Up to 40% of patients receiving vancomycin develop an acute kidney injury.
Hoping to solve this issue, UNSW and international researchers working alongside Australian diagnostics company Nutromics developed a minimally invasive patch that tracks the antibiotic in patients every five minutes.
