All-in-One Approach to Diabetes Treatment.

• Author: Trafton, Anne

Before consuming a meal, many people with diabetes need to inject themselves with insulin. This is a time-consuming process that often requires estimating the carbohydrate content of the meal, drawing blood to measure blood glucose levels, and then calculating and delivering the correct insulin dose. Those steps, which typically must be repeated for every meal, make it difficult for many patients with diabetes to stick with their treatment regimen, but a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers has come up with two new approaches to streamline the process and help patients maintain healthy glucose levels.

"Any intervention that makes it easier for patients to receive therapy can have an enormous impact, because there are multiple barriers that have to do with time, inconvenience, dexterity, or learning and training," says Giovanni Traverso, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and a gastroenterologist at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. "If we're able to overcome those barriers through the implementation of new engineering solutions, it will make it easier for patients to receive that therapy."

MIT postdocs Hen-Wei Huang and Sean You, and visiting students Luca Di Tizio and Canchen Li, are the lead authors of a paper on the devices appearing in the Journal of Controlled Release.

Diabetes affects 34,000,000 people in the U.S. and more than 400,000,000 worldwide. Patients with diabetes often use two types of insulin to control their blood sugar levels: longacting insulin, which helps control glucose levels over a 24-hour period, and short-acting insulin, which is injected at mealtimes. Patients first measure their blood glucose levels with a meter, which requires pricking their finger to draw blood and placing a drop of blood onto a test strip. They also must estimate how many carbohydrates are in their meal and combine this information with their blood glucose levels to calculate and inject the proper insulin dose.

Existing technologies such as continuous blood glucose monitors and insulin pumps can help with some parts of this process. However, these devices are not widely available, so most patients must rely on finger pricks and syringes.

"Every day, many patients need to do this complicated procedure at least three times," Huang says. The main goal of this project is to try to facilitate all of these complex procedures and also to eliminate the requirement for multiple devices. We also used a smartphone...