QDIS Blog

Implantable Drugs

by Ed Vawter @ 10:29 am. Filed under Asides

Implantable drugs are something I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about for a couple of reasons. This article on the recent approval of Implanon contraceptive (which lasts three years) from Organon got me thinking again.

FDA approves implantable contraceptive - Yahoo! News:

A little background: this of course is not the first implantable contraceptive. Wyeth (formerly American Home Products) had Norplant approved back in 1990 which they stopped selling in 2000 after several lawsuits. Norplant lasted seven years and was implanted in the forearm. Since then, there haven’t been any implantable birth control. Another implantable drug is the Gliadel wafer for brian cancer. This is implanted near a tumor in the brain and was approved in Feb 2003. There may be others but my point is the technology exists and could be used in other areas.

Back to my thoughts on implantable drugs. I spent about five years working on a polymer drug conjugate which, although not implantable (it was delivered by IV) had a lot of similarities to polymer rug released products. I spent a lot of time learning about analytical methods for characterizing polymers in a cGMP environment.

I have also had some experience with schizophrenia; I had my best friend with schizophrenia in graduate school commit suicide by taking potassium cyanide from the chemistry stockroom. I also know a little bit about how depression and other mental illness and their effect people and there families. One of the problems with these sorts of medical problems is that once these people are on the correct drug, their symptoms disappear and they feel much better. In fact, it is not uncommon or them to feel so good, they think they no longer need their drugs. Another problem is CNS drugs have undesirable side effects ranging from headaches, to feeling like your thinking is slow, to sexual problems, and others issues. So there are several reasons people want to go off their medications even though it may indeed be helping.

My though has been to make implantable forms of CNS drugs. Now, I’m the first to admit that there are potential problems with this. What if there are serious side effects? One of the problems with Norplant was not that it didn’t work but that there were complications with trying to get the implant removed and there were also some side effects. My thought was to put patients on an oral form of the drug to see if there are any side effects and then if there are not, the implantable form could be used. This would be especially useful in serious cases of schizophrenia in patients who may be a danger to themselves or others. This would solve the “roller coaster” problem of going on and off drugs causing even more problems. I would say that I also realize that this would not be appropriate in all circumstances and would have to be managed carefully at first. However, the long term pay off should be more than worth it in preventing re-occuring hospitalization of those with serious problems.

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