Fluorescent tattoos: The latest innovation in a long, long journey towards non-invase blood monitoring

I was sent this story about a novel tattoo for detecting glucose in blodd, from bostinnovation.com:

Northeastern professor Helen Clark and her team have created a tattoo that can track sodium and glucose in the bloodstream using a modified iPhone.

To create the tattoo (which is not visible to the naked eye), the team injects a specialized solution into the skin of a patient. The specialized solution is made up of 120-nanometer-wide polymer droplets. The droplets consist of a fluorescent dye, sensor molecules designed specifically bind to certain target molecules (in this case, sodium or glucose) and neutralizing ions. First, the sensor molecules bind to a particular target molecule because they are opposite in charge.  Then, the binding triggers the release of the neutralizing ions from the droplet, creating fluoresce when exposed to light.

To observe the fluoresce (and thus the presence of the target molecule like sodium or glucose), one of the team’s graduate students tricked-out an iPhone to do the job. The iPhone, which sits in a custom case, is attached to a nine-volt battery, has a specialized filter over the iPhone’s camera and 3 LEDs that produce visible light (which causes the tattoos to fluoresce). The filter in front of the camera removes the visible light, leaving only the fluorescent light. The iPhone then takes photos of the tattoo which are then analyzed by an external computer, but the team hopes to create an app within the phone to analyze the tattoo.

Last week I was making a presentation on mobile trends to a client in the pharma industry, and one of the questions I received was "what are some innovations around non-invasive glucose monitoring?". Given that this is from a company, and an individual, who has forgotten more about diabetes than I will ever know, I probably should have been more circumspect.

[As an aside, non-invasive blood monitoring will be a Really Big Deal when it arrives, transforming the lives of people who have to prick their fingers for blood samples several times a day, and eviscerating the high-margin test-strip business model.]

So, armed with some cursory knowledge, and a whole-hearted belief in the power of technology, I referred to a couple of technologies, such as the OrSense finger-based monitor that uses light reflections off blood vessels (only approved for investigatory purposes) and the contact lenses that use nanotechnology to change color depending on glucose levels (not yet approved for much of anything). I hadn't seen the tattoo idea referred to above, and am not qualified to judge whether it really stands to 'move the needle', but do welcome it as another step towards the denouement of this long and painful journey.

Image: The OrSense Glucose reader prototype. (Source: OrSense.com)

On further, but still cursory, inspection, it's clear that non-invasive blood glucose monitoring has been 'just around the corner' for decades now, rather like Brazil's economic miracle. It is a space that has seen more than its fair share of over-enthusiastic entrepreneurs and venture capitalists making promises that science can't keep. It's a tricky problem for various reasons, such as glucose being very small, pretty much invisible and the fact that the absence of it is as important to discover as as excess of it. 

For those interested, long-time industry veteran John Smith has a highly readable and informative analysis of this quest (hopefully not Sisyphian) here. For those with less time, it's worth having a look at this picture taken from a patent application for measuring glucose, based on the way light passes through liquid in the eye.

It was filed in 1976.

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