We’re able to use implants for contraceptives so why not other things? Would be great if it was an option for people needing to control chronic illness symptoms.
In: Chemistry
A drug needs to be stable, the dose needs to be fairly constant, and the implantation is a procedure a little more complicated than swallowing a pill. It’s also more difficult to discontinue.
The market of implantable medications is growing, so there will be more on the market.
I worked at a startup working on this for certain diabetes meds. You need to keep the drug stable in the body for the duration of the treatment, this can be challenging, consider how many drugs need to go in the fridge/freezer. You also need a way to deliver a constant rate overtime, my understanding is that contraceptive implants the rate changes over the lifetime but this is generally ok, not the case for all drugs.
This has to do with how the medicine is adsorbed by the body and how fast the medicine is elminated from the body.
Medicines have specifc “routes” in the body to end up where the medicine needs to be. Skipping a step by implanting it, means the medicine doesn’t work or does something completely else in the body.
Not every medicine that can be injected in the bloodstream can be “transformed” into a pill that has the same effect.
The second reason is elimination, if the half time of the medicine (time the concentration of the medicine is halved in the body) is 4 days. You only need to take the medicine every couple of days to stay in the “therapeutic window”(between these two concentrations the medicine has an effect and the effect is not toxic to the body).Therefore an implant in that case would be strange.
However a medicine with a half time of 1 hour makes more sense to have as an implant.
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