This skin patch can sense glucose levels and deliver a drug as needed

diabetes patch

Assistant professor at Seoul National University Dae-Hyeong Kim and researchers at MC10, a flexible-electronics company in Lexington, Massachusetts, are trying to free people with diabetes from frequent finger-pricks and drug injections. Their solution comes in the form of an electronic skin patch that senses excess glucose in sweat and automatically administers drugs by heating up micro-needles that penetrate the skin.

The prototype device, described in a paper in Nature Nanotechnology, is made of graphene studded with gold particles and contains sensors that detect humidity, glucose, pH, and temperature. The enzyme-based glucose sensor takes into account pH and temperature to improve the accuracy of the glucose measurements taken from sweat; when it senses high glucose levels, heaters trigger micro-needles to dissolve a coating and release the drug metformin just below the skin surface.

The patch could store data on drug delivery activity and transmit it to a wearable device.“This is the first closed-loop epidermal system that has both monitoring and the noninvasive delivery of diabetes drugs directly to the subject,” according to Roozbeh Ghaffari, cofounder of MC10.

What’s more, the patch could also store data on drug delivery activity and transmit it to a wearable device that could then beam it to a smartphone (and from there to a cloud-based service).

It is still unknown when MC10 will make this patch available to the users, but considering the relatively long process of clinical trials and regulatory approvals, chances are we won’t see it on the market before at least 2017.

In the meantime, the company is also working on a wearable technology for patients with neurological disorders, and something more mundane — a UV monitor patch developed in co-operation with L’Oreal.

[Via: TechnologyReview]