Team:BSC United
Abstract
While diabetes mellitus afflicts hundreds of millions of people in the world, combination of dietary control, physical exercise, and insulin injection is the conventional approach for diabetic treatment. The patients are annoyed by ceaseless torture of blood sampling and/or insulin injection on daily basis. Our project “MINILOSS” (MIcrofluidic orgaN chIp for bLOod glucoSe Stabilization) commits to an innovative, painless, bio-based approach for diabetic treatment. Ordinary people have functional pancreas to secrete insulin to metabolize glucose, while diabetics need insulin injection. Our ultimate goal is to enable probiotic bacteria within the GI tract to sense glucose level and to secrete insulin by the synthetic bacteria. Currently, we have accomplished an in vitro model to illustrate such a process. The model incorporates multidisciplinary knowledge of synthetic biology, microfluidics, electrochemistry, and electrical engineering to provide an “organ-on-a-chip” for the simulation of automatic regulation of glucose level for diabetic patients.
