Injecting New Ideas into Drug Delivery Systems: A Brief Review on Microchips as Controlled Drug Delivery System

Advancements in active drug delivery technologies promise precisely controlled targeted treatments. To get effectively from point A to point B, you need a safe and reliable mode of transportation. If your brakes are shot or your radiator is on the fritz, a faulty vehicle can break down and leave you stranded on the side of the road. Likewise, drug-delivery devices are the vehicles ensuring that critical treatments safely reach their destinations and their reliability is equally important. Because if these delivery systems fail, you may find yourself in a dire situation. Luckily, drug-delivery technology appears to be advancing at a rapid clip. Controlled-release drug delivery systems have many applications, including treatments for hormone deficiencies and chronic pain. A biodegradable device that could provide multi-dose drug delivery would be advantageous for long-term treatment of conditions requiring pulsatile drug release. Novel drug delivery and biosensing devices have the potential to increase the efficacy of drug therapy by providing physicians and patients the ability to precisely control key therapy parameters. Such intelligent systems can enable control of dose amount and the time, rate, and location of drug delivery. A microchip system has the ability to store a large number of drugs or chemicals, control the time at which release begins, and control the rate at which the chemicals are released. The microchip could be integrated with a tiny power supply and controlled by a microprocessor, remote control, or biosensors. This microchip technology has potential uses in areas such as medical diagnostics, chemical detection, combinatorial chemistry, drug delivery and cosmetics. All these certainly make microchip drug delivery systems to be an potential area to be explored by young scientists.