Asking a diabetes patient whether or not they have an implant could soon become as usual as asking them about taking insulin or avoiding sugary foods.
This follows the invention by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, of a potentially life-saving implant the size of a small coin.
In a paper published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, the researchers said they had developed a “miniaturised, lightweight, minimally invasive, fully wireless emergency rescue device for the storage and active burst-release” of drugs for emergency delivery.
People living with the less common, but more debilitating, type 1 diabetes need to be injected with the hormone glucagon if their blood sugar drops low enough to pose a mortal danger.
But sometimes, patients’ levels can drop without them realising until too late, or while they are sleeping – scenarios that could leave them struggling to get hold of a glucagon jab in time.
So the MIT team developed an “implantable reservoir” to be placed under the skin that contains a shot of the hormone.
This shot releases when blood sugar level plunges during a condition known as hypoglycaemia.
Some diabetes patients can be “unaware that they’re hypoglycaemic, and they can just slip into confusion and coma”, said MIT Department of Chemical Engineering professor and senior study author Dr Daniel Anderson.
“This is also a problem when patients sleep, as they are reliant on glucose sensor alarms to wake them when sugar drops dangerously low,” he explained, claiming that the implant could diminish the anxiety felt by patients living with one eye fixed on a glucose monitor.
The “in vivo wireless device” could be used to deliver other drugs for other emergencies, such adrenaline in the case of heart attack and drugs to counter anaphylactic shock in the case of food allergy reactions, according to MIT. – dpa
