PK-Tracker: A Real-Time Bedside Device for Continuous Therapeutic Drug Monitoring

Abstract

Medical procedures often require the administration of drugs, whose dosing is typically guided by pharmacodynamic responses rather than direct measurement of concentrations. This limitation largely arises from traditional monitoring procedures that rely on repeated venous sampling followed by laboratory analyses using cumbersome and costly instrumentation, often returning results hours or days later. Access to a bedside platform capable of real-time drug monitoring would represent a major advance toward personalized dosing, particularly for drugs exhibiting rapid pharmacokinetics (t1/2 < 4 h). Here, we present PK-Tracker, a bedside device that enables real-time point-of-care monitoring of therapeutic drugs. We demonstrate its in vivo applicability for monitoring the curare rocuronium, a nondepolarizing neuromuscular blocker widely used for surgical procedures. Using a newly developed aptamer sensor, PK-Tracker provides time-resolved measurements every 10 s, allowing high-precision pharmacokinetic profiling. We also demonstrate PK-Tracker’s versatility through the continuous in vivo monitoring of the antibiotic vancomycin, highlighting the platform’s generalizability across clinically relevant pharmacological classes for broad therapeutic drug monitoring. Together, these results establish PK-Tracker as a promising bedside technology for real-time drug monitoring of short half-life drugs, enabling precision dosing toward improved perioperative patient care.