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It was a passionate letter from the grandmother of a diabetic girl that set Robert D. Rosenthal, president of Futrex Inc., on to the task of inventing what the diabetic community has dubbed a "Dream Beam." What the desperate grandma wanted was a way to liberate her granddaughter from the distressing daily ritual of drawing blood for the glucose measurements that govern the child's diet, physical activity, and insulin injections. For Rosenthal--whose company already had developed a light-based, no-pain device for measuring body fat--that meant a challenge: develop a device that uses light to monitor glucose levels in blood without breaking the skin, something akin to the thumb-sized diagnostic gizmo that Star Trek doctors wave over the sick and injured of the 23rd century.
Rosenthal took the woman's entreaty to heart. Creating a noninvasive (no cutting or puncturing of tissue), portable, affordable, and easy-to-use glucose monitor has become a high priority for Rosenthal and his Gaithersburg, Maryland, company. Compassion for the millions of diabetics who have to make themselves bleed every day isn't the only incentive: The glucose monitoring market is estimated to be in the $500 million range, and the first company to produce a needleless (or lanceless) system will make a financial killing. "It's a hot race and we're one of the horses," Rosenthal says.
Dozens of other companies--from small biotech firms such as Biocontrol Technology Inc. of Indiana, Pennsylvania, to giants such as Miles Inc.--are also in the race, but it's not yet clear that any of them will actually cross the finish line. The obstacles are daunting: Researchers must find a way to shine light though a pinch of skin, detect the faint signals emitted when glucose absorbs specific wavelengths, extract those signals from the morass of background noise generated by other blood constituents and surrounding tissue, and calculate glucose concentrations from those weak signatures with pinpoint precision.
"I'm not even convinced it is possible," admits Mark Arnold, an analytical chemist at the University of Iowa who has corporate backing to be one of the contenders. Arnold, who described his research efforts at the August meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Washington, D.C., has made enough progress to stay in the race, however. Rosenthal and David Purdy, president of...