A bionic pancreas has been developed that could end the need for painful injections for people with diabetes. It uses a novel algorithm for controlling implanted insulin pumps that can be personalised for individual patients.
Computer simulations shows delivery is fast - and closely mimics natural function. Lead author Professor Claudio Cobelli, of the University of Padova, Italy, said: "Not only is intraperitoneal infusion of insulin much more physiological because you are reproducing the natural physiology, but it simplifies the control problem because you don't have delays. So, this means you can have a very simple, robust controller to handle the everyday situations."
The artificial organ could revolutionise treatment. Type 1 diabetes affects 46.3 million people worldwide, and the number of people affected increases by about three percent each year. It requires careful calculations of insulin needs. Many patients require several doses to manage their condition daily and protect against other diseases caused by high or low blood sugar.
Standard delivery is through injections with small needles many times a day. It can be especially uncomfortable and unwieldy - reducing quality of life. The hormone is naturally produced in the pancreas, then travels to the liver where it helps process glucose.
A person suffering from type 1 diabetes does not produce enough insulin. All patients require some sort of dosage. Current automated insulin delivery requires patients to manually enter the number of carbohydrates they consume, announcing their meals to the system before they eat.
It is also slow to sense and deliver insulin. These delays, along with the likelihood of errors in manual meal calculations, make the system prone to inaccuracies and increase prevalence of high insulin - a condition that damages large blood vessels. The international team developed a model that can account for individual patient differences and validated a pump control algorithm that does not require meal announcement.
Prof Cobelli said: "This is a big plus. It helps with tuning the devices and allows personalisation. Different people have different needs, so you need to personalise the algorithms.”
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By combining results from previous work and current experiments, the researchers validated the pump control algorithm to take into account time variance for breakfast, lunch and dinner meals. Their work reported in APL Bioengineering is part of a European project called 'FORGET DIABETES' that aims to rapidly advance automated insulin delivery technologies to the point of clinical trials. Diabetes is now one of the world's top ten killers.
