Treatment for diabetics has historically included cannula implantation and implantable medical equipment. Scar tissue, however, could form while these operations are being carried out in the patient’s surgical sites. The foreign body response, a phenomenon, may occasionally cause issues for patients.
Engineers from MIT and its coworkers have created a device that can stop scar tissue from being brought on by implantable insulin-releasing devices. In a study on mice, it was demonstrated, according to an MIT press release, that when mechanical actuation was included in a soft robotic device, the device maintained functionality for a far longer period than a conventional drug-delivery implant.
Every 12 hours, the researchers’ unique invention inflates and deflates for five minutes. It also prevents immune cells from collecting close to implanted devices in addition to this mechanical deviation.
Ellen Roche, the Latham Family Career Development Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, explains that she and her team are using this type of motion to increase the lifespan and effectiveness of implanted reservoirs that can deliver medications like insulin. They also believe that this platform can be used for other purposes.
The possibility of using this created gadget to treat diabetes as a “bioartificial pancreas” is still being investigated.
Eimear Dolan, a former postdoc in Roche’s lab who is currently an instructor at the National University of Ireland at Galway, and Roche are the study’s co-senior authors. A major contributor to the research, which was published in Nature Communications, is Garry Duffy, who is also a professor at NUI Galway. The principal authors of the paper are visiting scholar Sophie Wang, MIT postdocs William Whyte and Debkalpa Goswami, and Debkalpa Goswami. The National Institutes of Health, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and Science Foundation Ireland all contributed to the research’s funding.