Preparation of Low Invasive Type Glucose Sensor for Continuous Glucose Monitoring

Abstract

Implantable glucose sensors for a continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system are getting more attractive, since it not only provide an instant glucose value but also its continuous value trend, which help to provide an effective medical treatment. However, the current commercialized or presented conventional CGM sensor devise are required to have about an length of 1.0 cm to be inserted inside the skin. Therefore, it is desirable to develop a lower invasive type glucose sensor to improve the quality of life of diabetic patients.We have previously proposed an unique glucose sensor, which has a sensing region at the tip of a fine tapered needle. Therefore, it only require a short tip of the sensor devise to be implanted to perform as an CGMS sensor. We attempted to implant this sensor device for a length of 1.0 mm in the skin, and the glucose monitoring was performed. As a result, we could obtain sensor response, which had a good correlation with blood glucose value trend. This result indicate that the glucose measurement in a lighter region than subcutaneous tissue, which might be in dermis, may also provide valuable information for diabetes patients’ blood glucose management. Nevertheless, low-invasive sensor, which is essential with miniaturization of sensing region, leads to a decrease of glucose response current. Therefore, the improvement of sensor sensitivity is also indispensable. In this study, we prepared glucose sensors in various procedures to develop a sensor with high sensor sensitivity.