Scienceblogtwo

A group of researchers from the University of British Columbia who are creating oral insulin tablets to replace daily insulin injections have made a critical finding. Researchers have found that rats absorb insulin from the most recent iteration of their oral tablets in a manner similar to that of rats receiving insulin by injection. Professor Dr. Anubhav Pratap-Singh (he/him), the principal investigator from the faculty of land and food systems, says, "These exciting results show that we are on the right track in developing an insulin formulation that will no longer need to be injected before every meal, improving the quality of life, as well as mental health, of more than nine million Type 1 diabetics around the world." He reveals that his diabetic father, who has been injecting insulin three to four times a day for the past 15 years, served as the motivation for his hunt for a non-injectable insulin. The senior fellow in Dr. Pratap-lab, Singh's Dr. Alberto Baldelli (he...

Wearable sensors are ubiquitous thanks to wireless technology that enables a person's glucose concentrations, blood pressure, heart rate, and activity levels to be transmitted seamlessly from sensor to smartphone for further analysis. Most wireless sensors today communicate via embedded Bluetooth chips that are themselves powered by small batteries. But these conventional chips and power sources will likely be too bulky for next-generation sensors, which are taking on smaller, thinner, more flexible forms. Now MIT engineers have devised a new kind of wearable sensor that communicates wirelessly without requiring onboard chips or batteries. Their design, detailed today in the journal Science, opens a path toward chip-free wireless sensors. The team's sensor design is a form of electronic skin, or "e-skin" -- a flexible, semiconducting film that conforms to the skin like electronic Scotch tape. The heart of the sensor is an ultrathin, high-quality film of gallium nitrid...