"The MIT team used Raman spectroscopy — a technique that reveals the chemical composition of tissues by shining near-infrared or visible light on them — to develop a shoebox-sized device that can measure blood glucose levels without any needles.
In tests in a healthy volunteer, the researchers found that the measurements from their device were similar to those obtained by commercial continuous glucose monitoring sensors that require a wire to be implanted under the skin. While the device presented in this study is too large to be used as a wearable sensor, the researchers have since developed a wearable version that they are now testing in a small clinical study."
In tests of “a” healthy volunteer? Meaning that it always read perfectly normal +/- 15? (Or rather at least 80% of the time?) At first glance not impressed
I am not too impressed with the interstitial fluid readings that CGMs use in general.
So far, all of these new devices are just different flavors of that the same thing. The watches, the rings, the contact lenses - all of them are just developing different ways of reading the interstitial fluid.
I wish someone would work on developing an actual continuous BLOOD glucose monitor. Something that sits in a blood vessel and gives readings of actual blood glucose.
That would be the Grail, right? But we probably can’t get there in a single step. Doing as well as a CGM but without intrusiveness would be a big step. No site problems, lower cost etc… That could be a huge step already.
What would be nice is a permanent implant/diversion in the portal vein which had a catheter running back to the surface of our skin. A glucose monitor could be run down the catheter so that it could measure the blood glucose yet be replaceable; sort of like eversense but getting immediate BG readings.
The catheter would also deliver insulin (regular is fine; no skin delay) and glucagon as required. Since the glucagon goes in before the liver the reaction time to low BG is pretty much zero.
No one seems to be interested in this apparently simple approach. Maybe it gets thrown out because it poses several different problems but the core problem, implanting a delivery device in a vein, seems to have been solved and in regular use:
That alone would be an enormous big step in the treatment of diabetes. Add a blood glucose monitor and the world is our mollusc.
I spent 10 months in a hospital once, and I had one of those. I had 4 infections in 10 months, one of them very serious. I think that, for a T1, it could be much worse. To me, a solution that is infection-prone does not appear as a good option for T1s.
Also, btw, I hated that catheter with a passion. I was a very athletic 22-year old and this seemed to be in the way all the time:(
Exactly; that is what I am saying. The mechanical approach is fine at least up to the skin but the skin interface needs work. The guys doing it for cancer treatment don’t much care; they just keep spraying the patient with chlorox, but they only have to do it for a few months.
The problem should be soluble. How much more difficult is it to create a safe skin interface than it is to deal with tissue, or implant, suppression without suppression of the immune system?
Given that my Omnipod and my CGM both present enormous potential for injection why am I not suffering from infections a couple of days after every new pod or every new G7?
I’m completely with you there. I won’t consider a tubed pump.
The infection problem is mostly solved if the device is implanted rather using a tube that is exposed on the surface.
They would need to solve the problem with clotting, but I think there are materials that are used in heart implants that are designed to prevent blood clots. I dunno.