Smart Electronic Eyedrop Bottle for Unobtrusive Monitoring of Glaucoma Medication Adherence.

Glaucoma, the leading cause of irreversible blindness, affects >70 million people worldwide. Lowering intraocular pressure via topical administration of eye drops is the most common first-line therapy for glaucoma. This treatment paradigm has notoriously high non-adherence rates: ranging from 30% to 80%. The advent of smart phone enabled technologies creates promise for improving eyedrop adherence. However, previous eyedrop electronic monitoring solutions had awkward medication bottle adjuncts and crude software for monitoring the administration of a drop that adversely affected their ability to foster sustainable improvements in adherence. The current work begins to address this unmet need for wireless technology by creating a "smart drop" bottle. This medication bottle is instrumented with sensing electronics that enable detection of each eyedrop administered while maintaining the shape and size of the bottle. This is achieved by a thin electronic force sensor wrapped around the bottle and underneath the label, interfaced with a thin electronic circuit underneath the bottle that allows for detection and wireless transmission to a smart-phone application. We demonstrate 100% success rate of wireless communication over 75 feet with <1% false positive and false negative rates of single drop deliveries, thus providing a viable solution for eyedrop monitoring for glaucoma patients.

The latency of peroxisomal catalase in terms of effectiveness factor for pancreatic and glioblastoma cancer cell lines in the presence of high concentrations of H2O2: Implications for the use of pharmacological ascorbate in cancer therapy.

Previous research has identified variation in cancer cell line response to high levels of extracellular H2O2 (eH2O2) exposure. This directly contributes to our understanding cellular efficacy of pharmacological ascorbate (P-AscH-) therapy. Here we investigate the factors contributing to latency of peroxisomal catalase of a cell and the importance of latency in evaluating cell exposure to eH2O2. First, we develop a mathematical framework for the latency of catalase in terms of an effectiveness factor, ηeff, to describe the catalase activity in the presence of high levels of eH2O2. A simplified relationship emerges, [Formula: see text] when mprp/Dij≪1, where mp,rp, and [Formula: see text] are the experimentally determined peroxisome permeability, average peroxisome radius, and the pseudo first-order reaction rate constant, respectively. [Formula: see text] is the catalase concentration in the peroxisome and k2=1.7x107M-1s-1. Next, previously published parameters are used to determine the latency effect of the cell lines: normal pancreatic cells (H6c7), pancreatic cancer cells (MIA PaCa-2), and glioblastoma cells (LN-229, T98G, and U-87), all which vary in their susceptibility to exposure to high eH2O2. The results show that effectiveness is not significantly different except for the most susceptible, MIA PaCa-2 cell line, which is higher when compared to all other cell lines. This result is counterintuitive and further implies that latency, as a single parameter, is ineffective in forecasting cell line susceptibility to P-AscH- therapy equivalent eH2O. Thus, further research remains necessary to identify why cancer cells vary in susceptibility to P-AscH- therapy.