P. Cezanne - implantable glucose sensors

[Boulton]

Dear all.

My names Sarah I am a new person on this forum. I personally do not have diabetes, however, know that at some point in my life i probably will develope the disease looking at my family track record. An unusally high number of my friends and relatives are affected by both type 1 and 2 diabetes, and curiosity is what drove me here and to do the job that i do. its scary having your best friend at uni starting shaking uncontrollably and shrieking for lucozade tablets that she cant unwrap herself due to tremor. its bloody terrifying.

he reason i came to this forum is becasue i work for a company in England called Labman, We are a bespoke robotics company and we have not a whole lot to do with diabetes, however, the the particular project i am working on is called P. Cezanne. and has an awful lot to do with diabetes.

i was hoping that you guys would see that this post is NOT SPAM, i have nothing to sell you, but what i am here to do is to try and find out more about whether i am a useful person or not. the Projects website is

http://www.p-cezanne.eu

The project is sponsored by the European Commision (no not some crazy in a shed!!!) and has been running for about 22 months now. The project aims to generate a shedload of research and information to be able to make an implantable device capable of internally measuring the blood sugar levels based on interstitial fluid measurement (the liquid between your bodies cells and tissues)and sending information to a smartphone, a bit like how bluetooth pictures can be sent between phones, except a bit more useful for control!!!

ANYWAY: with this project just starting out really, we have another 3 years of work to do before we actually get anywhere, i was hoping that i might be able to bring this to your attention as a discussion point, to see if you think this is something that would be good or not, whether you would use something like this yourself, whether you would undergo a small implanting procedure for a full years worth of continuous monitoring data.

i must reiterate this is NOT SPAM. P. Cezanne is a european commissioned consortium of researchers, scientists and doctors from 14 different countries all working together to try and discover something new to help diabetics everywhere. we have no product to sell, we have no profit to make. this technology doesn;t exist yet, we are designing it and building parts as i type this.

I would really appreiciate your thoughts on this, please let me know what you think of our efforts.

Cheers!
Boulton.

 

[Bobro]

i been sending this idea round to other companies like yours for years...

in ibiza there is a tag you can have implanted under the skin, then when you are out you no longer need a wallet and cash as you walk in a club they just scan over the implant and it debits your account... i said why not just adopt the device to read sugar levls.. making it to a smart phone might be more complicated than just making a device specified for reading sugar levels, (im thinking RFID style scanning and size)

i dout im the only one here that would agree to an implant to prvent the need to stab my finger! i work in computers, my hobbies include computer games, drawing and guitar, i dont need sore fingers!!!!!!!!!!

make it make it now

 

[Boulton]

(just to point out, we aren't a business or company, more a research council if you will and this isn't an idea than can be simply 'made' the technology simply doent exist yet!!!)

Y'know when i started the project i was surprised too that this didn't exist, the problem lies in the bodies natural need to reject bits of **** you stick into it, like the way that your piercings heal skin around the post of the jewellery, or a hip implant works loose or outgrows overtime. As soon as you implant a sensor, the part that interacts with your bodies fluid starts to get covered with a bit of annoying stuff called Fibrin, its like your bodies label for stuff that shouldnt be there. it furs up the sensor wether its an electrode or a filter, much like a kettle filament furs up over time, stopping it from working. unfortunatly, this only takes a few days to for our awesome bodies do, meaning the transdarmal (throught the skin) sensors we have on the market now only last a few days at most.

Would you have an implant?

 

[Dennis]

Hi Boulton,

I would certainly have an implant if and when the technology exists.

But I have a question for you. We currently measure sugar by using a blood sample as it is within the bloodstream that sugar is deposited and is consistently measurable. The composition of interstital fluid (or tissue fluid) depends upon the exchanges between the cells in the tissue and the blood. This means that tissue fluid has a different composition in different tissues and in different areas of the body.

Not only are the contents of interstital fluid and blood different, but they also differ in different parts of the body. Wouldn't that mean that trying to measure blood glucose levels via an interstital fluid implant would give variable (and perhaps inaccurate) sugar measurements depending on whereabouts the implant was sited?

 

[Boulton]

this has been a point of much debate in our EC reviews.

the implant would be placed subcutaneously in the abdomen. We havwe agood and very rich blood supply floating about there.

2 things to bear in mind:

the first thing is that there is of course a lag time between the glucose level of the blood and the glucose level of the interstitial fluid to balance, this is anywhere between 5 minutes and a half hour depending on the vascularity (or the type of vessels) of the area. i avoided saying 'equalibrium' due to my second point...

...the second point being that for a specific area, it may not be a case of the interstitial fluid and the blood being the same in concentration but that their is a relationship between their concentrations-being linear or nonlinear- that is compensated for using sophisticated software that our poor poor software geeks are currently inventing right now.

the reason the consortium chose to investigate the interstitial fluid instead of the blood is because the project aims to not have permanent holes in people. with an elecrode, there is a wire of sorts running through your skin inside to out, the same with microdialysis. this can get irritated, the swelling or oedema could affect the glucose concentration sensed, and most of all, its uncomfortable for the user. if you were to constantly sample the blood in this manner, there might have to be a permanent puncture in a blood vessel which would be simply unacceptable.

the point here i suppose is that relationships between fluid compartments are constant. this gives us the basis to research complex algorithms and from that *hopefully* develope some software that allows us to interpret the information we get from the sensor in terms of glucose concentration