Reinventing Personal Glucose Devices

One could say the holy grail of diagnostic medicine is simple, low-cost point-of-care technologies that can be implemented in the home or in laboratories outside of the high-tech infrastructure we have come to know in the developed world. In a race in which there have been only a few winners over the last few decades, one technology stands above them all: personal glucose meters (PGMs).PGMs have been around for more than 40 years and are universally used for intensive diabetes control. Much time and money have gone into making these tools robust and reliable, according to many researchers.Aware of this serious vetting process, chemistry professor Yi Lu and his postdoctoral fellow Yu Xiang at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had an idea: What if they take the PGM, capitalize on its functionality, and use it to test for analytes other than glucose?Other laboratories have attempted the feat, but Lu and Xiang tried something different: They wanted to use the PGM to detect for nonglucose analytes without changing the device in any way.We sat down with Lu to chat about the new technology and how the team has already made leaps in the technology's functionality.Yi LuXu XiangRobert MittendorfAfter years of perfecting technologies that allowed in vitro visualization with colorimetric assays, Lu wanted to try something different. “It was nice, but we still needed a device to see the fluorescence,” says Lu. He and Xiang wondered if …