Implantable Glucose Sensor for Diabetes Management
An implantable glucose biosensor to continuously monitor blood sugar levels, which is being developed at Texas A&M University, will revolutionize diabetes management. Dr. Melissa Grunlan, associate professor of biomedical engineering, and her research team are developing a 'self-cleaning' membrane that envelops an implanted glucose sensor, shielding it from the body's immune response that would otherwise render it nonfunctional.
Transcript
00:00:10 For a diabetic, monitoring their blood-sugar levels and keeping them under control is absolutely critical. for their overall health. So if you don't keep your blood-sugar level in check, that could eventually lead to death or cardiovascular disease, eye problems - people have to have leg amputations. So what a diabetic has to do right now is do finger-prick tests with something called a glucose meter. This finger-prick test is just this one timepoint, snapshot of what their blood sugar is. What we're trying to do is something very different. It's going to enable potentially a diabetic to have continuous glucose monitoring. The sensor that we're trying to develop, we envision that it will be placed in the skin, just below the wrist, and this device will be complemented with something that looks like a watch. The watch device is a pretty standard LED with a photodetector, and that LED shines light in and then it gets
00:01:18 light back from the implanted device, and that changes color, based on the glucose concentration. So the idea there is you can measure it as often as you want, and so by monitoring more often you can regulate your sugar levels better. This should have an immediate impact on short- and long-term complications and the amount of dollars spend to treat diabetics. Developing this implanted glucose biosensor is actually a team effort. So it's really two parts to the technology. One is the biocompatibility membrane our biomaterials folks like Dr. Grunlan are working on, and then the sensor chemistry - and that's the fluorescence and the optics, and that' my area. We're using light in terms of monitoring the behavior of proteins in response to glucose. And so just the idea of putting two different fields together is just great. This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, and this
00:02:19 funding has enabled us to prove that this concept actually works. Right now we think that the self-cleaning membrane has other far-reaching potential as well. So whether it's a clotting or the foreign-body reaction, a lot of medical devices fail due to this inability to keep their surface clean, so we think that the membrane could actually have far-reaching implications for medical devices in general. And if you think about children who have to manage this disease, think about how much freedom we're giving those kids. And so to give them that freedom is something that we're really driven to do.