Description du projet :
Modern therapeutics must benefit from the development and large-scale implementation of convenient, user-friendly, miniaturized, integrated instruments enabling drug concentration monitoring and seamless pharmacokinetically guided dosage individualization. Technological advances during recent years make it possible to envisage a portable system, which would allow to perform drug concentration measurement in patients receiving critical treatments. The device should be offered at affordable cost to specialized clinics, and progressively to general practices or even to the patients themselves (as it is already the case for blood glucose determination). Translation of concentration measurement values into personalized treatment advices requires the integration of efficient and ergonomic computer tools into the system. These need to be coupled with communication capabilities, which are nowadays becoming a standard in many aspects of medical care, in order to be connected to reference pharmacokinetic-parameters databases.
The conception of our Point-Of-Care (POC) system is addressed to respond to three main objectives: (i) perform the measurement of drug concentration in blood samples by an automated and compact analytical setup; (ii) provide the medical doctor with information on the behavior of the patient within the population and accordingly suggest dosage adjustment; (iii) collect drug usage and measurement data into a remote database, enabling further refinements in dosage adjustment procedures. The aim of the TheraPer project is to develop a sample-to-result POC system, which would include all the outlined functions. In particular, the system will be stand-alone and provide communication and elaboration functions in a configurable fashion in order to respond to different application needs.
The TheraPer consortium holds a composite set of know-how and owned technologies to develop each technological component of the system, namely: a miniaturized blood sample preparation device, connected to a compact and low-cost analytical system with electronic readout for determining the drug concentration; an embedded elaboration software framework to determine dosage adjustment, manage population data and connect with remote databases; finally, a flexible and ergonomic graphical user interface to interact with the user at different levels of complexity.
The project relies on the longstanding experience of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at CHUV in Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM). During the past decade, this group has played a significant role in the development of new monitoring approaches in various fields of therapeutics (HIV, cancer, fungal infections), and it is now internationally regarded as a center of excellence in this domain. The team will contribute to the project by bringing knowledge and practice about drug dosage individualization, along with technical competences in population pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic analysis, state of the art tools, and expertise currently used for drug analysis in biological matrices.
The TheraPer project has the potential to contribute to different scientific domains, as granted by the high-impact publication records which resulting from the research work of the partners. Concomitantly, TheraPer will be able to target the development of a reliable prototype within the timeframe of the project, thanks to the outstanding engineering skills and the industrial experience of the consortium.
Dosage individualization is the key to improve cost-effectiveness and efficacy of medical treatments worldwide. For this reason, the TheraPer project raised the interest of the World Health Organization. Indeed, the potential impact of an affordable POC system for TDM in decreasing costs and improving treatment efficacy of HIV in developing countries will be consistent.
Research team within HES-SO:
Thoma Yann
, Divorne Sandrine
, Rigamonti Roberto
Partenaires académiques: ReDS; Thoma Yann, ReDS
Durée du projet:
01.11.2013 - 31.10.2017
Montant global du projet: 562'250 CHF
Statut: Completed
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