{"id":230846,"date":"2026-02-08T01:06:21","date_gmt":"2026-02-08T07:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/simple-patch-can-make-medications-safer-and-more-effective"},"modified":"2026-02-08T01:06:21","modified_gmt":"2026-02-08T07:06:21","slug":"simple-patch-can-make-medications-safer-and-more-effective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/simple-patch-can-make-medications-safer-and-more-effective","title":{"rendered":"Simple patch can make medications safer and more effective"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/simple-patch-can-make-medications-safer-and-more-effective.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Vancomycin is the antibiotic doctors reach for when almost nothing else will work. It\u2019s used in hospitals for serious drug-resistant infections, or for when an infection is spreading through the patient\u2019s bloodstream, but it\u2019s also notoriously tricky to dose: too little and it won\u2019t knock out the infection, too much and the patient risks kidney damage or even death. Up to 40% of patients receiving vancomycin develop an acute kidney injury.<\/p>\n<p>Right now, dosage levels are monitored by repeated blood tests, an invasive and time-consuming process that can\u2019t always give clinicians the data they need in time. Hoping to solve this issue, UNSW and international researchers working alongside Australian diagnostics company Nutromics developed a <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/news\/2022-12-wearable-sensor-precision-drug-dosing.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">minimally invasive patch<\/a> that tracks the antibiotic in patients every five minutes.<\/p>\n<p>The team has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41587-026-03010-w\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> the results of a clinical trial in <i>Nature Biotechnology<\/i>, and say its success demonstrates that the major scientific and safety challenges have been solved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vancomycin is the antibiotic doctors reach for when almost nothing else will work. It\u2019s used in hospitals for serious drug-resistant infections, or for when an infection is spreading through the patient\u2019s bloodstream, but it\u2019s also notoriously tricky to dose: too little and it won\u2019t knock out the infection, too much and the patient risks kidney [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}