Nanotechnology to end insulin injections for diabetics

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>> My name is Tajal Desi assumed spelling I'm a professor at the University of California San Francisco and I'm using nanotechnology to develop an artificial pancreas.

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>> Imagine putting 1 capsule into the body and having it take care of diabetes for you. No more pin pricks. No more insulin injections and it sits there for as long as that patient needs it. The pancreas does many things but one of the most important functions is to regulate the levels of sugar in your body and it does this by secreting insulin. What we do is we take the cells of the pancreas, the ones that secrete insulin and we put them in this tiny capsule which is nano porous. So what that means is they have little holes that are extremely small and those holes allow for the insulin that is released by the cells to come out into the body but they're small enough to keep out all of the things that might attack those cells. So this square device is actually a capsule and it has a central reservoir where you can put millions of cells and the back of the reservoir are the tiny nano pores. This prototype capsule and it's actually 10 times larger than what would be implanted in a human but each of these little rectangles is actually millions of nano pores. We like to think about the capsule as almost like a tea bag. So with a tea bag you put a bag of tea in some hot water and the hot water flows into the tea bag and releases the tea molecules that are sort of sitting inside that netting. The same thing can be said with our capsule but instead we have sugar that comes into the capsule and it alerts those cells that we put inside to secrete insulin. We make these capsules in a clean room because nanotechnology creates devices that are smaller than dust and so if we actually created it in a normal lab we would have dust coming down on our device and actually potentially clogging up the pores. The real benefit of nanotechnology is creating that small pore that can only allow for insulin to go out but doesn't allow for these large immune cells or antibodies to come in. You can't actually do that with anything that's on the large scale.

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