Leveraging Biomedical Engineering To Realize Life-Saving Combination Product Innovations

By Christine Ford, Event Director, PharmaMedDevice, Reed Life Sciences

Defined as the application of engineering principles to problems in clinical medicine and surgery, biomedical engineering is responsible for some of today's most important lifesaving innovations, ranging from imaging technologies to nanomedicine. Many innovations currently being developed using biomedical engineering are taking shape as combination products, which integrate a drug, a biologic and/or a medical device into a single product.

Because biomedical engineering encourages collaboration between various scientific disciplines, it is playing an increasingly important role in the development of new innovations as the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical industries continue to converge. In fact, biomedical engineering can be seen as driving this convergence in many ways as a multidisciplinary science combining skill sets of several previously distinct areas. As an indication of the rapidly changing life sciences landscape, materials and mechanical engineers are now collaborating with chemists and biologists who worked in vastly different domains just a few years ago.

According to Michael Drues, Ph.D., President of Vascular Sciences, biomedically engineered combination products can be both evolutionary and revolutionary in nature. For example, they can take the form of today's second-generation drug-eluting stents as well as tomorrow's "Star Trek-like" concepts that promise to deliver drugs to highly localized areas within the body using nano-motorized robots.