Project

RESORB

On-Demand Bioresorbable OptoElectronic System for In-Vivo and In-Situ Monitoring of Chemotherapeutic Drugs

Aim

RESORB - an EIC PathFinder Open project funded by the EC - envisions in-vivo bioRESORBable chemical sensing systems, where electrical and optical devices, power and light sources, chemical receptors - made out of materials that fully dissolve with biologically benign byproducts in biofluids - will be developed and integrated for tracking of chemotherapeutic drugs.

Vision

Imagine a world in which your doctor could slip a miniaturized sensing system under your skin and use it to continuously monitor the concentration of almost any molecule in real-time as it circulates through your peripheral blood. This would revolutionize many areas of diagnostics, enabling individualized reports on both disease progression and drug efficacy to be achieved continuously, in real-time. Imagine now the sensing system implanted under your skin to communicate with your mobile phone (wireless communication) to transfer the clinically relevant data (biomarker or drug concentration) directly to your doctor. This would heavily impact the way we diagnose diseases and monitor drug efficacy, currently based on single-moment-in-time tests, enabling personal, timely, and effective medical feedback (real-time personalized medicine). Finally, imagine the biochemical sensor in your body is RESORBed upon a click, once you don’t need it anymore. This would eliminate any need for sensor retrieval, avoiding risks connected to surgery and providing a risk-free “red button” to destroy it, in case issues will occur (e.g., end of the therapeutic process, inflammation, malfunctioning).

Our long-term vision is based on the insight that bioresorbable materials provide a unique opportunity to engineer new electrical, optical, and sensing components into an in-vivo biodegradable sensing system that eliminates any boundary between target molecules and sensing devices, granting direct access to biofluids and acting as an in-situ sentinel once implanted in the body, without the need of sec  ondary device-retrieval surgery that may cause tissue lesion or infection.

Impact

RESORB has a tremendous potential in personalized medicine, especially for those treatments that benefit of a continuous and localized monitoring of specific analytes for a limited time, e.g. chemotherapeutic tumor treatment, post-surgery sepsis, acute trauma treatment, pharmacokinetics profiling, disease biomarker detection, without resorting to present-day paradigm used in clinical practice, i.e. chemical sensing through ex-situ analysis of extracted biofluids, which has proven not always adequate or timely to respond to clinical needs.

In-vivo bioresorbable biochemical sensing developed within RESORB promises to elucidate a more complex and timely picture of what is going on in the patient body, enabling new diagnostic techniques and therapeutic treatments, with a tremendous impact on healthcare, social, and economic EU systems.