Scientists from MIT have developed an innovative, needle-free method of measuring blood sugar that could revolutionize the lives of diabetics. This new method does away with the pain of frequent blood sugar monitoring by using light and not needles.
A non-invasive tool roughly the size of a shoebox, devised by this team, uses near-infrared light directed at the skin to measure glucose levels. Using the data produced by interactions between the light and molecules in the skin, it is able to estimate blood sugar concentrations.
The test results showed that the readings from this new method were similar to those of commercial continuous glucose monitors, which involve the use of very thin wires implanted beneath the skin. While the new device at this point is still too big to be portable, the researchers have designed a more compact device, which is currently undergoing clinical trials.
“For many years, finger-sticking tests have been the norm for tracking blood glucose, but they are cumbersome and painful,” says Jeon Woong Kang, research scientist at MIT and co-author of the study. “This can lead to patients not monitoring their glucose as regularly as they ought to, which can have life-threatening side effects. Such a high-precision, non-invasive glucose tracker would make a tremendous impact for almost every patient living with diabetes.”
The publication comes this month in the Journal “Analytical Chemistry,” and the research is headed by postdoctoral researcher Arianna Bresci at MIT.
Although there are patients today who are wearing “wearable glucose monitors,” they require a sensor to be implanted under the skin and have to be replaced every one to two weeks.
The approach used in MIT relies on Raman spectroscopy, which analyzes chemical components based on how scattered near-infrared light is in given tissue samples. One of the biggest hurdles in this process has been that a glucose molecule generates a very weak signal, which has been hard to separate out from ambient noise.
To counter this problem, the scientists illuminated the light from a different angle from that at which it detected the scattered signal. This helped to eliminate background interference. While a regular Raman spectrum consists of approximately 1,000 signal peaks, the scientists found that it is possible to calculate glucose concentration by analyzing only three signals: that of glucose and two background signals.
This simplification of requirements allowed the team to lower the complexity and the cost of the system, making it possible to develop a system with minimal hardware requirements.
"What we were able to do was transform the way the Raman device is designed so that the size, time, and expense were substantially reduced," Bresci told Reuters. In the first clinical trial, carried out at the Center for Clinical Translation Research at MIT, the device was used to track a healthy volunteer’s glucose levels when the volunteer rested his arm on the sensor for four hours. The success of the project paved the way for the development of a glucose monitor in watch form.
