Originally published in The Nano Newswire
The daily prick of the finger may soon be a thing of the past. A team at Northeastern University has developed an invisible tattoo using nanotechnology, which soon may allow us to monitor blood without actually drawing any – with the help of an iPhone.
The team, led by Professor Heather Clark of the Pharmaceutical Sciences department, developed the idea of a "tattoo" of nanoparticles, which are injected into the skin. The nanoparticles are generally invisible to the naked eye, but fluoresce when they are exposed to a target molecule (in the case of the diabetes patient, glucose). The iPhone app tracks the changes in fluorescence, which indicates the amount of the target molecule.
The nanoparticles in the "tattoo" have the opposite charge of the target molecule, so they attract. The nanoparticles release ions in order to maintain a neutral charge in the body, thus changing the fluorescence. The special light emitted from the iPhone app reveals this fluorescence. The more of the target molecules that are present, the more the fluorescence changes.
A graduate student on the team, Matt Dubach, created a modified iPhone case which allows any iPhone to "read" the nanoparticle tattoos. The information is then exported to a computer for analysis. Dubach and Clark hope, however, to create an app which would measure and record the fluorescence right on the user's phone, without the need to export the data for analysis.
In addition to helping diabetes patients monitor glucose levels, this technology may one day allow athletes to monitor sodium levels to prevent dehydration, and anemic patients to monitor blood oxygen levels.
As reported in Technology Review, this innovation has remarkable potential. "I don't think there's any doubt that this sort of technology will catch on," says Jim Burns, head of drug and biomedical research and development at Genzyme.
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