Smart Watches On The Rise To Treat Diabetes
An innovative approach using smartwatches to curb Type-2 Diabetes
The impending challenges of obesity and diverse other health conditions act as motivation to drive thousands of people out of their cozy beds and into their jogging shoes. However, what good is exercise if you don’t know how many calories you burnt or how much more you need to burn? Times changed and technology emerged. No more wondering about the answer to these questions. Now we all have our smartwatches to strap on and go be responsible, healthy, and fit adults.
However, we must rack our brains and ask ourselves, can these smartwatches do more than just measuring heart rates and calculating calories burnt in a day? More precisely, can researchers make them do more than that? The answer seems to be YES.
A team led by Martin Fussenegger of ETH from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering is on the quest to make smartwatches more than just necessary jogging gear.
Smartwatches can be the New Heroes
It has now become important to kill the suspense and shed some light on what these smartwatches are intended to do. The researchers from Zurich aim to present a smartwatch-controlled mammalian gene switch that would be triggered by the green light emitted from the smartwatch. To make this possible, a genetic switch has to be implanted in an individual. The usefulness of this technology is controlling Type-2 Diabetes and the symptoms that accompany the disease. Such symptoms would include insulin resistance, obesity, and fasting blood glucose among others.
The Science of Things
Optimizing the Smart Watch
Smartwatches are now synonymous with fitness trackers. They work by emitting pulsed green light that penetrates the skin to give a record of the heart rate and the physical activity of the individual wearing the gadget.
Fussenegger iterates that, “Off-the-shelf watches offer a universal solution to flip the molecular switch”. Therefore, since any standard smartwatch or modern fitness tracker emits green light, the smartwatches do not require specific case-sensitive programming in this case.
We now know that the green pulsed light from the watch can flip a molecular switch. This consequently necessitates having a molecular switch that can be triggered to induce a cascade of reactions involved in the biochemical pathways.
“No naturally occurring molecular system in human cells responds to green light, so we had to build something new,” the ETH professor adds.
Therefore, the next step was to design a molecular system that responds to the green light emitted from the watch.
The Photoreceptor CarH gene contributes to the genetic switch
The CarH gene is a gene coding for a photoreceptor protein found in Thermus thermophilus. It protects the organism from the cytotoxic effects caused by the sun’s rays. The Cobalamin Binding Domain (CBD) of the CarH protein maintains a dimer form in the dark. In this conformation, it is bound to the 5’ deoxy adenosylcobalamin chromophore. When the protein is subjected to the green light, it breaks to form a monomer.
The genetic switch comprises a synthetic transcription factor (Transcription is the process involved in synthesizing mRNA from DNA. The mRNA further gets translated into proteins. This entails the Central Dogma) bound to the CBD domain of the Thermus thermophilus, abbreviated as the TtCBD domain. It is sequestered to the transcription factor with a supercharged TtCBD plasma-membrane anchor. Therefore, when the smartwatch is switched on to emit the green light, the transcription factor is released. It consequently targets other specific promoters such as the glucagon-like peptide 1 involved in the molecular signaling regulating the pathways of Type-2 Diabetes.
Moving Ahead….
Fussenegger and his team proceeded to test the genetic switch on pork rind and mice by developing the switch with appropriate cells unique to the test subject species and then attaching a smartwatch to their bodies to examine the smartwatch-genetic switch ensemble.
“It’s the first time that an implant of this kind has been operated using commercially available, smart electronic devices — known as wearables because they are worn directly on the skin,” says Fussenegger.
Though this particular approach to cellular therapy is quite lucrative and beneficial for individuals residing on the Diabetic spectrum of the population, it is estimated to reach the commercial market in over ten years. Customization of the genetic switch concerning human use is the first step towards the commercialization of the therapeutic approach. Moreover, cellular therapies such as these also require approval from federations and the government to become available for large-scale use.
Upon the successful implementation of this particular cellular therapy, it can be safe to say that various other metabolic pathways can be targeted in our body other than those leading to Diabetes. Research can be focused on diverse transcription factors that can help curb other diseases. Therefore, with researchers building on it, this innovation has the potential to achieve great success in the years to come.
