This small implant can save diabetics from silent and deadly accidents

As a backup copy of the emergency, for cases where patients may not realize that the blood sugar level decreases to dangerous levels, the Massachusetts Institute engineers designed a transplant tank that can remain under the skin and run to the release of glucagon when blood sugar levels decrease.

This approach can also help in cases where blood sugar decreases during sleep, or for children with diabetes who cannot give injection alone.

This is a small, empty-event deficate that can be place MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, A MEMBER of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (Ims), and the Senior Author Of the study. “Our goal was to always build a ready -made device to protect patients from low blood sugar. We believe this can also help reduce fear of hypoglycemia that many patients and parents suffer from.”

The researchers have shown that this device can also be used to provide emergency doses of ibenifrin, a drug used to treat heart attacks, and severe allergic reactions, including allergies, can also be prevented.

Sidharth Krishnan, a former research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is now an assistant professor in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, is the main author of the study, which was published on July 9 in The nature of biomedical engineering.

Response to the emergency

Most patients with type 1 diabetes use daily insulin injections to help their bodies absorb sugar and prevent blood sugar levels from height. However, if blood sugar levels in the blood decrease, they develop blood sugar, which may lead to confusion and seizures, and it may be fatal if not treated.

To combat hypoglycemia, some patients carry a pre -loaded coincidence of glucagon, a hormone that stimulates the liver to release glucose in the bloodstream. However, it is not always easy for people, especially children, knowing when they become a lack of blood sugar.

“Some patients can feel when they get low blood sugar, go to something or give themselves glucagon,” Anderson says. “But some are unaware that they are blood sugar, and they can only slip into confusion and coma. This is also a problem when patients sleep, because they rely on glucose sensors to wake them up when sugar decreases dangerously.”

To facilitate blood sugar deficiency, the Massachusetts Institute team set out to design an emergency device that can be caused either by the person who uses it, or automatically by a sensor.

The device, which is about a quarter, has a small drug tank made of 3D printed polymer. The tank is closed with special materials known as a memory alloy, which can be programmed to change its shape when heated. In this case, the researcher used a programmed nickel-tantinium alloy to wander from a flat panel to the shape of U when it is heated to 40 ° C.

Like many other protein or peptide medications, the glucagon tends to break down quickly, so the liquid shape in the body cannot be stored in the body. Instead, the MIT team created a crazy version of the drug, which remains stable for a long longer and remains in the tank until it is released.

Each device can carry either doses or four doses of glucagon, and also includes an antenna indicating the response to a specific frequency within the scope of radiological frequencies. This allows it to run away to turn on a small electric current, which is used to heat a memory alloy. When the temperature reaches the threshold 40 degrees, the slab is bent in the form of U, which releases the contents of the tank.

Since the device can receive wireless signals, it can also be designed so that the drug is released by a glucose screen when the blood sugar level decreases to less than a certain level.

“One of the main features of this type of digital drug delivery system is that you can speak to sensors,” says Krishnan. “In this case, the continuous glucose monitoring technology that many patients use is something that will be easy for these types of devices to interact with them.”

Reverse blood sugar

After planting the device in diabetic mice, the researchers used it to release the glucagon with low blood sugar levels in animals. Within less than 10 minutes of stimulating the release of the drug, blood sugar levels began to fix, allowing them to stay inside the normal rate and avoid a lack of sugar in the blood.

The researchers also tested the device with the release of ibenifrin powder. They found that within 10 minutes of the release of the drug, the levels of ibenifrin in the bloodstream became high and increased heart rate.

In this study, researchers kept the planted devices for up to four weeks, but they are now planning to see if they can extend that time to at least a year.

“The idea is that you have sufficient doses that can provide this therapeutic rescue event for an important period of time. We don’t know exactly what it is – perhaps for a year, perhaps a few years, and we are currently working to determine the optimal life. But then, it must be replaced.”

Usually, when a medical device is planted in the body, the tissue of the scar develops around the device, which can interfere with its function. However, in this study, the researchers showed that even after fibrous tissues were formed around the transplant, they managed to successfully operate the release of the drug.

Researchers are now planning additional animal studies and hope to start testing the device in clinical trials during the next three years.

“It is really exciting that we see our team accomplish this, which I hope will one day help diabetics and can present a new model on a broader scale to present any emergency medicine,” says Robert Langer, professor of the David H Coach Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and newspaper author.

Other authors Okeh, Arna Rudra, with Gustop, Limited, Clay Liu, Annai Wang, Anthony Pocick, Jeon Chun Boss, wing.

The research was funded by Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, National Institutes of Health, post PhD fellowship JDRF, and the National Institute for Biological Medical Photography and Biological Engineering.