Diabetes is a disease that is prevalent across the globe with, according to the International Diabetes Federation, around 840 000 confirmed patients in South Africa alone (studies suggest that there may be as many as 1.5 million patients). Thus far, diabetics rely on blood testing machines check their blood glucose levels. Although they are small and portable, these machines can run into the hundreds of rands and cause a great deal of inconvenience if lost.
In January news broke that students at the Missouri University of Science and Technology had devised a biological system that could do away with current methods of blood sugar levels testing. The new system relied on strips embedded with genetically modified bacteria that could show a patient’s glucose levels through something as simple as a colour change in the strip.
The bacteria used in the strips were a non-virulent strain of E. coli, bacteria that fluoresce when glucose was present in their environment. The bacteria were genetically modified such that they would change colour when exposed to glucose, instead of just fluorescing. These modifications could also be refined such that the colour change of the bacteria and thus the strip relates to the blood glucose levels of the patient: green could represent normal glucose levels, yellow if levels are borderline and red if glucose levels are elevated.
If successful, these strips would mean greater convenience for diabetic patients: using something as simple as a disposable colour-changing strip to monitor one’s blood sugar levels would be much easier than carrying around a machine in your bag, one that if destroyed, would mean coughing up hundreds of rands to replace. Not so?
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