Hypoglycemia – Conditions where hypoglycemia levels can feel dizzy, weak and unstable can catch you with surprise. It often occurs due to excessive insulin, whether it is produced by your body or if you injected it too much.
There are ways to treat it quickly, but if hypoglycemia strikes while sleeping, or if it affects a child who can't jab themselves with glucagon injections, it can lead to areas of disorientation and more dangerous complications.
To counter this situation, a team of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a coin-sized device that can be safely embedded in the body if the sensors notice that their blood sugar levels are falling too low and could save the user's life.
The compact device, designed to be embedded under the skin, weighs only 0.07 ounces (2 g) and features a small reservoir of glucagon. This is a hormone that stimulates the liver and releases glucose into the bloodstream. It is also for people with hypoglycemia, including some people with type 1 diabetes, to bring them in with them in the form of predicted syringes and inject them whenever they feel symptoms of the condition they are coming.
Image courtesy of researchers
What's different here is the specially developed powder version of the reservoir glucagon, which remains stable for longer. The reservoir itself is made of 3D printed polymers and is sealed with a nickel titanium shaped alloy that curls from flat slabs into a U-shaped shape when heated to 104°F (40°C).
The small implant also includes an antenna that receives signals from a system that operates with a remote trigger or glucose monitor. This provides power to a small current and heats the reservoir seal to a temperature threshold. At that point, the glucagon is released into the body.
Researchers tested the device by embedding it in diabetic mice and found that it helps restore blood glucose levels to normal within 10 minutes of being triggered when glucose readings drop. This device has proven equally effective in dispensing powdered epinephrine. This helps to treat deadly allergies quickly.
Additionally, the team discovered that the device was functioning normally as an implant even after scar tissue was formed around it. Siddhar Krishnan, the lead author of the study that appeared in natural biomedical engineering this week, noted that it may last much longer than that. “The idea is that we have enough doses to provide this therapeutic rescue event for a considerable period of time,” he explained. “We don't know exactly what it is — maybe a year, maybe a few years, and we're currently working on establishing what the optimal lifespan is. But then we need to replace it.”
This device could be a boon for people with hypoglycemia that cannot administer glucagon injections themselves, or for people who have suddenly encountered extreme conditions.
It also makes life easier for people living with diabetes and using ongoing glucose monitors. This could disable the need to inject glucagon or disable the need to manually trigger it. Devices can be designed to receive signals from those wearables and provide doses without patient intervention.
The next steps for researchers will include further testing of animal implants and clinical trials with humans within the next three years.
The device includes a recent compelling approach to tackling hypoglycemia, including nanomedicines that can release glucagon in low-glycemia conditions in the bloodstream, and an on/off switch that can prevent hypoglycemia, including an on/off switch that can be added to insulin. Treating this condition effectively, as researchers noted earlier this year, could help people avoid blindness, which can be caused by hypoglycemia levels.
Source: MIT News
