In a previous post, Inhalation Report looked at the patent trends in the inhalation arts and posed the question of what would spark the next cycles of innovation. In this post, let’s focus the crystal ball on inhalation devices. It’s no secret that the pharmaceutical industry has been a slow adopter of new manufacturing technologies.1 The same is probably fair to say of the industry’s development and adoption of inhalation devices, due to a host of perceived risks, cost limitations, regulatory challenges, intellectual property rights, etc. However, the question of what comes next in inhalation devices is much more interesting when you ignore those perceived limitations.
In that spirit, what inhalation devices would result when you cross a team of inhalation scientists with a team of smartphone engineers (and shorten the product life cycle to match the attention span of the latter)? And what devices might arise from an open-source collaboration of pulmonary scientists and physicians? Here are a few inhaler features, some imagined and some published, that appear from one shake of the crystal ball:
- An inhaler with a built-in air quality monitor. Data from the device would be aggregated with data from other devices and plotted in Google Maps to show inhaler usage as a function of air quality and geographic area.
- An inhaler that can generate spirometry data and adjusts the treatment accordingly over time (e.g. see US 5724986 and WO/2005/046426).
- Inhaler usage history and spirometry data are wirelessly transmitted to the electronic copy of the patient’s chart, viewable by both physician and patient. Some of these concepts are described here.
- Inhaler calls your mobile phone as a reminder to take a dose.
- Inhaler tells patient when it’s time to clean the device.
- Inhaler’s dose counter triggers the inhaler to call to the pharmacy to order a refill pack.
- Inhaler modulates the patient’s inhalation waveform to target specific lung sites.
- Portable inhaler that can deliver both rescue and maintenance medications, at patient’s selection.
What other inhaler device technologies can you foresee? Add your visions to the comments below.
References
1. The Wall Street Journal, Sep 3, 2003.
