One of the biggest problems in treating people that have long term medical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, stroke, depression or schizophrenia is ensuring that they take their medication correctly every day as prescribed.

For a variety of reasons, that doesn’t always happen and that means that when the person visits the GP’s office, the practitioner doesn’t know whether a person’s condition has, for example, worsened, due to not taking medicines, or not.

 For this reason, it would be greatly advantageous if GPs could inject patients with a drug formulation that would release itself as required in the patient’s body, over a period of weeks, or even months.

 This is the reasoning behind the Prolonged Release Injectable Device Project (PRIDE) a collaboration between two applied research centres based at Waterford IT; the Pharmaceutical and Molecular Biotechnology Research Centre (PMBRC) and the South Eastern Applied Materials Research Centre (SEAM)

 PRIDE was recently awarded €145,ooo in funding from Science Foundation Ireland.

LISTEN: Interview with Dr Niall O’Reilly Manager of the PMBRC.

Broadcast on Science Spinning on 103.2 Dublin City FM on 15.03.2012