Towards an artificial pancreas at home

Abstract

To review the recent clinical research related to the development of an artificial pancreas and the current perspectives for its home use. All clinical investigations assessing closed-loop insulin delivery systems in diabetic patients in the literature were collected and analyzed to identify any significant advances as well as bottlenecks. The development of an artificial pancreas for ambulatory use offering an optimal substitute for insulin secretion has shown promising evolution over the past decade. The accumulated improvements achieved on the performance of insulin pumps using subcutaneous and intraperitoneal routes, continuous glucose monitoring and algorithms driving insulin infusion according to glucose measurement have led to numerous clinical trials recently, albeit only in a hospital setting so far. The key obstacles to achieving permanent normal glucose control are related to the delay of insulin action when infused subcutaneously or, at a lesser extent, into the peritoneal cavity, and blood glucose estimation made by subcutaneous interstitial measurement. These time lags impair the reactivity of the system, and suggest a need to develop complex algorithms aiming at their compensation. So far, manual interventions are needed at times of food intake to prevent hyper- or hypoglycaemic excursions when insulin changes rapidly. The most recent models using subcutaneous insulin infusion and glucose measurements linked by predictive control algorithms offer sufficient effectiveness and safety to consider their forthcoming use at home, during the night as a first step.