LEVELAND, Ohio -- What if a contact lens could tell you how high your blood sugar is by changing color?
Northeast Ohioans watching the Super Bowl last weekend, and reading local newspapers in the past two weeks, saw just such a technological innovation touted as the centerpiece of the University of Akron's marketing campaign this year.
But don't get too excited yet. The lenses, which are only in the prototype phase and not approved for human use, weren't actually worn by the model in the ads, but were simulated in the photo. Optimistically, it will be three years before such a lens could be commercially available -- and that's only if the researchers can clear funding and regulatory hurdles.
Wayne Hill, the university's Chief Marketing Officer, said the school wasn't concerned about featuring an early-stage product so prominently in its marketing campaign.
"It's progress along the way," he said. "Having people interested is a good thing." The university, which has run regional Super Bowl ads for the past 13 years, paid $150,000 for the advertising package, which includes print, radio and television ads.
Jun Hu, an associate professor of chemistry at UA, has been working on the sugar-sensing chemical key to the lenses since 2003.
"When you dissolve sugars in water you can't see them," he said. "Our approach was to make them visible in light."
He and his lab discovered a molecule, called a probe, that binds well to sugars. To make it visible, they combined the probe with a dye. When sugar concentrations rise, the sugar binds to the probe and knocks loose the dye, which can then be seen as a color change. The probe molecule picks the dye back up when sugar normalizes.
It was easy enough to put this system into a contact lens, which is 95 percent water, Hu said. Because blood sugar can be measured from tears, the contact lens changes color when blood sugar rises.
The blood sugar concentration can be measured using a digital camera, and Hu's team is also developing a smart phone app that will be able to read blood sugar concentration.
The next step for his team is to make sure dye binds completely to the contact lens and does not wash off. Any leaching of the dye could be dangerous to the eye and would make the contact lens qualify as a drug rather then a medical device.The business idea, if all goes well, he said, would be to provide the smartphone devices for free, like a blood sugar monitor, and charge for the lenses.
Barry Rosenbaum, a senior fellow with the University's Research Foundation, said that while they have a way to go, they believe the idea has potential to attract funding because the lenses have the benefit of being convenient and non-invasive.
The research team met with diabetes doctors in 2008 to consult about the project and Rosenbaum said "There's a sense that there's a high percentage [of diabetics] who would rather wear contact lenses than prick their finger."
"[The lenses are] really not very expensive," Hu said. "The tight monitoring of blood sugar is very important. The more checks the better. Right now, Medicare [will reimburse for] about six tests a day, and anything extra costs about 5 dollars. But your sugar concentration changes much more frequently than that."
Hu hopes that his lenses will allow people to check blood sugar as often as they like.
The team is looking for additional funding to continue their work, Barry Rosenbaum said. They have applied for a grant from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
"It's taken us longer than we would like, but we remain very confident in the technology," he said.
"We just hope that we can assemble the resources to have a prototype in the near future in the hands of the appropriate people."
