Why Alphabet’s Glucose Sensor Failed

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Silicon Valley takes on a tough biology challenge—and falls short
Chief technical officer Brian Otis, at Alphabet’s life science arm Verily, announced earlier this month in a blog post that the companies would put their in-eye glucose-sensing project “on hold.” They couldn’t get consistently accurate results from the device in clinical testing, Otis said in the post.

The announcement surely disappoints the scores of people with Type 1 diabetes who long for an easy, noninvasive device to track their blood sugar, or glucose. For now at least, these people are stuck with pricking their fingers multiple times a day to get glucose measurements from their blood.

But Alphabet’s announcement likely comes as no surprise to the many scientists who for decades have tried, and failed, to build such sensors. These researchers have attempted to track glucose not only in tears but also in other external bodily fluids such as sweat, saliva, and urine. And one after another, the projects have failed.

Some of these scientists have come to the conclusion that such a sensor just isn’t possible. “Truly noninvasive chemical biosensing is a holy grail, but really, really difficult,” says Jason Heikenfeld, director of the Novel Device Lab at the University of Cincinnati and cofounder of sweat sensor startup Eccrine Systems. “For example, in our own work with sweat it took us seven years of academic research” just to demonstrate that accurate continuous measurements of another, easier analyte—alcohol—are possible to measure in sweat, he says.

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