MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Brian Otis gingerly holds
what looks like a typical contact lens on his index finger. Look closer.
Sandwiched in this lens are two twinkling glitter-specks loaded with
tens of thousands of miniaturized transistors. It’s ringed with a
hair-thin antenna. Together these remarkable miniature electronics can
monitor glucose levels in tears of diabetics and then wirelessly
transmit them to a handheld device.
"It doesn’t look like much,
but it was a crazy amount of work to get everything so very small," he
said before the project was unveiled Thursday.
During years of
soldering hair-thin wires to miniaturize electronics, Otis burned his
fingertips so often that he can no longer feel the tiny chips he made
from scratch in Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, a small price to
pay for what he says is the smallest wireless glucose sensor ever made.
Just
35 miles away in the beach town of Santa Cruz, high school soccer coach
and university senior Michael Vahradian, 21, has his own set of
fingertip callouses, his from pricking himself up to 10 times a day for
the past 17 years to draw blood for his glucose meter. A cellphone-sized
pump on his hip that attaches to a flexible tube implanted in his
stomach shoots rapid-acting insulin into his body around the clock.
"I
remember at first it was really hard to make the needle sticks a habit
because it hurt so much," he said. "And there are still times I don’t
want to do it — it hurts and it’s inconvenient. When I’m hanging out
with friends, heading down to the beach to body-surf or going to lunch, I
have to hold everyone up to take my blood sugar."
The idea that
all of that monitoring could be going on passively, through a contact
lens, is especially promising for the world’s 382 million diabetics who
need insulin and keep a close watch on their blood sugar.
The
prototype, which Google says will take at least five years to reach
consumers, is one of several medical devices being designed by companies
to make glucose monitoring for diabetic patients more convenient and
less invasive than traditional finger pricks.
The contact lenses
were developed during the past 18 months in the clandestine Google X lab
that also came up with a driverless car, Google’s Web-surfing
eyeglasses and Project Loon, a network of large balloons designed to
beam the Internet to unwired places.
But research on the contact
lenses began several years earlier at the University of Washington,
where scientists worked under National Science Foundation funding. Until
Thursday, when Google shared information about the project with The
Associated Press, the work had been kept under wraps.
"You can
take it to a certain level in an academic setting, but at Google we were
given the latitude to invest in this project," Otis said. "The
beautiful thing is we’re leveraging all of the innovation in the
semiconductor industry that was aimed at making cellphones smaller and
more powerful."
American Diabetes Association board chair Dwight
Holing said he’s gratified that creative scientists are searching for
solutions for people with diabetes but warned that the device must
provide accurate and timely information.
"People with diabetes base very important health care decisions on the data we get from our
monitors," he said.
Other
non-needle glucose monitoring systems are also in the works, including a
similar contact lens by Netherlands-based NovioSense, a minuscule,
flexible spring that is tucked under an eyelid. Israel-based OrSense has
already tested a thumb cuff, and there have been early designs for
tattoos and saliva sensors.
A wristwatch monitor was approved by
the FDA in 2001, but patients said the low level electric currents
pulling fluid from their skin was painful, and it was buggy.
"There
are a lot of people who have big promises," said Dr. Christopher
Wilson, CEO of NovioSense. "It’s just a question of who gets to market
with something that really works first."
Palo Alto Medical
Foundation endocrinologist Dr. Larry Levin said it was remarkable and
important that a tech firm like Google is getting into the medical field
and that he’d like to be able to offer his patients a pain-free
alternative from either pricking their fingers or living with a thick
needle embedded in their stomach for constant monitoring.
"Google,
they’re innovative, they are up on new technologies, and also we have
to be honest here, the driving force is money," he said.
Worldwide,
the glucose-monitoring devices market is expected to be more than $16
billion by the end of this year, according to analysts at Renub
Research.
The Google team built the wireless chips in clean rooms
and used advanced engineering to get integrated circuits and a glucose
sensor into such a small space.
Researchers also had to build in a
system to pull energy from incoming radio frequency waves to power the
device enough to collect and transmit one glucose reading per second.
The embedded electronics in the lens don’t obscure vision because they
lie outside the eye’s pupil and iris.
Google is now looking for
partners with experience bringing similar products to market. Google
officials declined to say how many people worked on the project or how
much the firm has invested in it.
Dr. David Klonoff, medical
director of the diabetes research institute at Mills-Peninsula Health
Services in San Mateo, worked with Google to see whether glucose is
present in tears and whether the amount of glucose is proportional to
the amount of glucose in blood. He’s still analyzing but optimistic
about his findings and warns there are many potential pitfalls.
"Already this has some breakthrough technologies, but this is a moonshot, there are so many
challenges," he said.
One
is figuring out how to correlate glucose levels in tears as compared
with blood. And what happens on windy days, while chopping onions or
during very sad movies? As with any medical device, it would need to be
tested and proved accurate, safe, and at least as good as other types of
glucose sensors available now to win FDA approval.
Karen Rose
Tank, who left her career as an economist to be a health and wellness
coach after her Type 1 diabetes diagnosis 18 years ago, also is
encouraged that new glucose monitoring methods may be on the horizon.
"It’s
really exciting that some of the big tech companies are getting into
this market," she said. "They bring so much ingenuity; they’re able to
look outside the box."
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Follow Martha Mendoza at https://twitter.com/mendozamartha
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