ID-Health and AVIDA Medical, two medical innovation companies, are proposing an exciting project to transform the way polypills are made to allow for them to be personalised. A polypill is a single pill that combines multiple doses of medicines. This means a person can take just one pill instead of several, making it easier to manage and take their medication. An estimated 9% of heart attacks and strokes are due to patients not taking their medication as prescribed. If 80% of patients could be treated to target for high blood pressure then this would avoid 5,594 heart attacks and 8,350 strokes, saving the NHS £41.8M and £116.1M annually. Currently since COVID, only 68.2% of patients are treated to target. It will cost the UK an additional £50bn over the next 10 years in health, social care and wider economic costs due to slow down in health outcomes of CVD.
The project's main focus is to combine current capsule-making technology with advanced digital systems. This would allow for the creation of capsules that contain several different medicines, and each at the specific dose personalised to meet an individual patient's needs. By focusing on 'personalised' medicine, the project aims to better meet the diverse health needs.
This approach isn't just about making medication easier to take; it also has the potential to reduce costs, use less plastic, and lower energy use. All these factors contribute to a smaller carbon footprint, making the process more environmentally friendly.
This project aims to create a prototype that can provide these specialised polypills to thousands of patients every month. The initial focus will be on patients with heart disease and those recently discharged from secondary healthcare in the UK.
The project has gained support from experts and organisations, including the NHS. It's responding to a need for custom-made polypills, a demand that was identified in the work that underpins this project. This study showed that mass produced polypills don't meet individual need and the manual way more personalised polypills are made is a slow manual process with a lot of room for improvement, and this new technology is proposed as the solution.
On a social level, the project is expected to improve people's lives and health outcomes by making it easier for them to stick to their medication routines. It could also open new opportunities in the fields of pharmaceutical manufacturing and technology.