Tattoo To Monitor Diabetes

infonography notes that the "BBC is reporting about using tattoos to monitor the state of a diabetics' health. While TV's the Invisible Man series had this, this is actually real. Designed by Gerard Cote, of Texas A&M University they are made of polyethylene glycol beads that are coated with fluorescent molecules. Likely this will start to change the attitudes of parents who have been resisting the urging of their kids to get Tattoos."

Re:hmm is this slashdot news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Type 1 Diabetes has no link to activity, fitness or diet. In fact, Olympic Swimmer Gary Hall, Jr. developed it a few years back. Type 1 also hits most of its victims early in life, making it a longer term disease. It's also more serious, because unlike most type 2 diabetes, a type 1 does not produce any insulin and MUST take it in order to continue living. A type 2 can go for years without proper treatment, a type 1 can go a day or two (if they're lucky).

Gimme!

[mindriot]

If this is actually working, I'd happily volunteer to be the first to use it... I think the advantage is not that it's pain-free. I couldn't care less about pricking me in the finger. The real problems with conventional systems are

• You are dependent on an electronic device and test strips. You have to carry it with you at all times (or should at least), and I could move around much more freely if I did not need to take with me and look after my glucose tester.
• The test strips have to be bought regularly (I use between three and five per day), and they're not exactly cheap. It's also a pain because, at least in Germany, I have to get a Doctor's prescription each and every time I need to buy new supplies. Some sort of subscription would really help here. I am diabetic, and I will be for probably the rest of my life, so why the need to get a stupid prescription all the time, instead of having some sort of token that entitles me to buy my medication whenever I need to?
• Nothing could be of more help than a continuous measurement. That way, for example, I could immediately tell if my food had more carbs than I expected and I can react sooner.

Also, while devices for continuous measurement are out there, I don't expect them to be really comfortable, and I'd still depend on a device that I have to look after. So if this tattoo proves to be working, I'd be more than happy to use it.

Oh, and a question -- this polymer stuff reminds me of those materials used in modern hard-to-forge banknotes (see here [ecb.int] for instance), is that a similar material?

Wouldn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

The insulin would either get digested or not enter the blood stream in sufficient quantities.

Re:Flourescent tattoos

[Effugas]

I actually looked into this myself some time ago. (I was doing some research on some rather brainfucked abuses of inkjet printers.) Yes, you're absolutely right that raw fluorescent ink fails pretty spectacularly over time. Not only does sunlight (with its massive UV1/UV2 dosage) bleach the fluorescent tats down to a ugly yellow stain, but it apparently becomes quite...err...itchy over time.

Not pretty.

However, some massive new work is being done with encapsulating various forms of bio-active chemicals (the bleached ink molecules are enough to spawn an itch reaction) within various types of polymer chains. Some pretty interesting stuff is being done with encapuslating approaches...a really elegant breast cancer treatment works as follows: Take a potent anti-cancer agent (poison, to be blunt) and attach it to a non-toxic, heat-sensitive polymer, such that the combination of the two remains non-toxic.

Inject the combo into the bloodstream.

Take the patient, and dip her breasts in water hot enough to separate the polymer from the toxin. Now watch as two things happen:

1) Only the breasts reach critical temperature, so only they might be exposed to the chemo, and
2) The blood vessels in the breast will expand, and those sections with the most blood vessels will receive the highest dosage of the chemo. Those sections are usually tumors.

From what I can tell, it's pretty tricky to design the polymer that is stable at 98.6F and unstable at 105F -- any hotter, and you're doing damage with the heat alone! Creating arbitrarily stable non-toxics is comparitively much easier. That's what it sounds like they're doing here -- they're taking a molecule with a useful function (fluorescence), attaching it to something that prevents it from reaching toxicity, and linking the expression of fluorescence to the level of insulin surrounding the molecule.

It is likely a useful side effect of this will be generically functional fluorescent ink, replete with quite a bit more than the 20 pages of paperwork you're used to.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com