Diabetes has become an epidemic, sentencing over 460 million people worldwide to lifelong medication. Science is striving to find a diabetes treatment that can cure this chronic disease, but how close are we?
Diabetes is the major cause of blindness, kidney failure, heart attack, and stroke. It is estimated that the number of people affected by diabetes will rise to 700 million by 2045. This has led the World Health Organization to consider diabetes an epidemic.
Despite its huge impact on the global population, there is still no cure for any type of diabetes. Most treatments help patients manage the symptoms to a certain extent, but diabetics still face multiple long-term health complications.
Diabetes affects the regulation of insulin, a hormone required for glucose uptake in cells, resulting in high levels of blood sugar. While there are some similarities in symptoms, the two main types of diabetes develop in different ways.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that destroys insulin-producing beta-pancreatic cells. In contrast, patients with type 2 diabetes develop insulin resistance, meaning that insulin is less and less effective at reducing blood sugar.
The biotech industry is striving to develop new diabetes treatments and chasing the holy grail: a cure. Let’s have a look at what’s brewing in the field and how it will change the way diabetes is treated.
The needle-free revolution
In order to monitor their blood sugar levels, diabetes patients often need to prick their skin with lancets in an often uncomfortable and painful process. However, many companies are developing non-invasive methods to substitute finger pricking.
Integrity Applications, for example, has developed a device called GlucoTrack that can measure glucose using electromagnetic waves and is already available in Europe.
Similar technologies are popping up, with German firm DiaMonTec using an infrared laser to beam light through the skin of the finger to measure sugar levels and MediWise making use of radio waves. “The device could reduce costs for healthcare, which in the case of diabetes account for €90B a year in Europe,” said MediWise co-founder Panos Kosmas.
Patches are also becoming a popular form of measuring blood glucose without repetitive needle-pricking, such as FreeStyle Libre, an inch-wide patch that can be worn for up to two weeks and that requires a continuous, subcutaneous needle prick to install the device. At the University of Bath, researchers are developing a graphene patch that could provide greater accuracy by measuring sugar levels individually in multiple hair follicles.
Dutch firm NovioSense is going for a tiny device that is placed under the eyelid and would be more affordable than current continuous glucose monitors.
Meanwhile, Senseonics and Roche have developed a glucose monitoring device that is implanted under the skin and lasts for three months, although competition with FreeStyle Libre has been fierce, especially in Europe.
Still, non-invasive options to measure blood sugar often face issues regarding accuracy. The famous glucose-measuring contact lens that Google announced in 2014 was dismissed as “technically infeasible” four years later and further developments will be needed to reach the degree of accuracy of finger-pricking methods.
What’s next in diabetes treatment?
The global diabetes drugs market is expected to reach a massive €68B ($78B) by 2026, and we can expect all sorts of revolutionary technologies to come forward and claim their market share.
Researchers are already speculating about microchips that can diagnose diabetes type 1 before the symptoms appear, nanorobots traveling in the bloodstream while they measure glucose and deliver insulin, or silica particlesthat can slow down the digestion of food to prevent diabetes and obesity.
Whatever the future brings, it will undoubtedly make a huge difference in the lives of millions of people worldwide.