Excerpt
Leading edge semiconductor technology is enabling the development of smaller and more powerful medical devices for use inside the human body.
Despite the challenges of designing for environments that are typically inhospitable to conventional electronics, research teams from around the world are developing novel methods for the continuous, real time monitoring and sensing of a range of chronic diseases.
These advances, according to Dr Timothy Constandinou, deputy director of the Center for Bio-Inspired Technology at Imperial College London, are providing patients with a more portable, precise and personal way of managing their illness than ever before.
"We've come a long way since the days of the humble pacemaker," he noted. "Advances in biomedicine and information and communications technologies have enabled the healthcare industry to move towards a smarter, more decentralized approach centered not on the physician, but the patient.
"Our research involves a strong combination of integrated miniature sensing with intelligent processing, leveraging on state of the art semiconductor technology. We aim to make electronics work with biological processes, while still remaining small and consuming tiny amounts of energy."
Perhaps most significant of all about Imperial's research is that it relies heavily on a biologically inspired approach. Dr Constandinou explains: "This means that, rather than take a problem and engineer a mathematical solution, we say to ourselves 'how does the body do it?' and then model some electronics around that."
Dr Constandinou and his fellow biomedical engineers recently completed work on an artificial pancreas, which they believe has the potential to 'close the loop' on Type 1 diabetes.
The bionic system comprises an electrochemical sensor that monitors blood sugar levels continuously; a chip that mimics the unique electrical characteristics of alpha and beta cells in the human pancreas; and two small pumps worn on the body.
"In a patient with Type 1 ¬diabetes, the body's immune system attacks and kills the insulin, secreting beta cells and causing an increase in blood glucose," explained Dr Constandinou. "Over time, the glucagon secreting alpha cells also tend to fail, so people with Type 1 diabetes become prone to episodes of extremely low blood sugar.
"As such, we designed the chip's control algorithms to mimic the very different behaviors of the two cell populations. An alpha cell tends to react to rapid electrical events (spikes), while the beta cell tends to react in bursts of voltage spikes, punctuated by low voltage silent periods that last for seconds or even minutes. When glucose concentrations rise, the beta cells remain in the high voltage burst state longer, secreting more insulin as a result."
Imperial's bionic pancreas mimics this biological process by detecting the user's glucose level via a sensor every five minutes. If it reports a high level of glucose, the silicon beta cell generates a signal that drives a motor.
This motor pushes a syringe, dispensing insulin into the tissue beneath the skin until the glucose reading at the sensor drops. If the sensor reports a low glucose value, the silicon alpha cell activates the second pump to administer glucagon instead.
"This biometric approach diverges from today's dominant method of delivering only insulin using a relatively simple control system," commented Dr Pantelis Georgiou, who led the project. "The great thing about our system is that it lets people with diabetes do away with multiple insulin injections and administer the insulin in a more biologically faithful way. This reduces any secondary complications and means patients no longer have to worry about what they eat and drink."
COMMENT: I did predict this quit awhile ago because it was technologically possible.
I also have a personal interest, I now have Type-2 Diabetes, which could develop into Type-1 if I am not careful.
This development is, of course, not ready for prime-time. When it does hit the "street" it will be costly, but considering the number of Type-1 Diabetics there are in the world, the costs will come down over the years.
How fast the costs come down will depend on:
- How fast the biomed industry recovers costs of development (or so they tell us)
- The overall demand and usage
- Any government support world-wide
IF government healthcare starts paying for this, and how soon, will have a big effect on the speed costs come down. Governments will have to see a positive cost-benefit to paying for this.
That is they will have to see an overall savings in health care costs when they consider ALL the costs from the complications of Diabetes when compared to the cost of the Artificial Pancreas and implantation.
This could be jump-started by nations whose philosophy considers the health of citizens as being of prime importance and are willing to pay even before costs come down.
The hold back will be market greed. How long will the biomed industry keep prices high, beyond recovering development costs, just to make more money.
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