Tech & Innovation in Healthcare

Question: We have several patients in our practice who suffer from diabetes, and nearly all of them complain about the pain of the finger prick test multiple times a day.

Is there a way they could perform the test with less pain?

Wisconsin Subscriber

Answer: Good news may soon be on the way. In 2021, researchers at the University of Newcastle in Australia announced they developed a pain-free diabetes test. By measuring the glucose concentration in the patient’s saliva, the test eliminates the need for painful finger pricks when testing type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

Researchers found that one of the biggest challenges was that saliva contains glucose concentrations that are approximately 100 times lower than in blood, and are home to a number of other substances. The biosensor is coated with glucose oxidase, which produces a reaction that creates an electrical current when the test interacts with saliva.

Once the current is detected, the glucose levels are measured precisely, and the results can be transmitted to an app with the data stored in the cloud.

The Centre for Organic Electronics (COE) team and GBS, the team’s commercial partner and grant recipient, started construction on a manufacturing facility in 2021. In a June 23, 2022 statement, GBS announced the start of biosensor manufacturing on the University of Newcastle campus.

“Our laboratories have provided the infrastructure to construct and evaluate thousands to tens of thousands of saliva glucose biosensor test strips as part of ongoing development efforts to optimize response time, consistency, and most importantly, benefit the patients afflicted with diabetes. The new facility will be able to accelerate the processes we have in place with GBS to ultimately assist in transferring this technology from the lab to commercialization in several regions around the world,” said Paul Dastoor, physicist and professor at the University of Newcastle and director for COE, in the statement.