Diabetes is a chronic disease that affects global population. Diabetes mellitus is a commonly seen chronic disease, which seriously threatens the health of human beings. Diabetic patients control their blood-sugar levels via insulin introduced directly into the bloodstream using injections. However effective monitoring and treatment options are important.
Nanotechnology offers some new solutions in treating diabetes mellitus. Nanotechnology, particularly nanoparticles show great promise in improving the treatment and management of diabetes.
Insulin and blood sugar
A new method uses nanotechnology to rapidly measure minute amounts of insulin and blood sugar level to assess the health of the body’s insulin-producing cells. As oral insulin consumption is useless a new system has been developed based on inhaling the insulin (instead of injecting it) and on a controlled release of insulin into the bloodstream (instead of manually controlling the amount of insulin injected). Further nanoparticles are being explored as vehicles for improved oral insulin formulations.
Glucose sensors
The use of nanotechnology in the development of glucose sensors is also a prominent focus in non-invasive glucose monitoring systems besides having new implantable or wearable sensing technologies that provide continuous and extremely accurate medical information.
Nanotech microchip
Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine have invented a portable microchip-based test for diagnosing type-1 diabetes employing nanotechnology that could speed up diagnosis, improve patient care and enable to understand the disease as to how the disease develops.The microchips distinguish between the two main forms of diabetes mellitus, which are tedious to characterize due to slow, expensive tests.
Nanopump
The nanopump is a powerful device having many applications in the medical field. Insulin delivery is an important application of the pump. The pump injects Insulin to the patient's body in a constant rate, balancing the amount of sugars in the blood.
Implantable nanopore box
Researchers from Ohio State University and Boston University have created a tiny silicon box that contains pancreatic beta cells taken from animals. The box is surrounded by nanopore with 20 nanometers in diameter which are big enough to allow for glucose and insulin to pass through them, but small enough to impede the passage of much larger immune system molecules. These boxes can be implanted under the skin of diabetes patients to temporarily restore the body’s delicate glucose control feedback loop without the need for powerful immune suppressants that can leave the patient at a serious risk of infection.
Artificial pancreas and artificial beta cell instead of pancreas transplantation, nanospheres as biodegradable polymeric carriers for oral delivery of insulin are some of the use of nanotechnology in diabetes.
Thus nanotechnology is a focal point in diabetes research, where nanoparticles in particular are showing great promise in improving the treatment and management of the disease.