How Does the Sensor Work and What is the Scientific Advance?
“The most important point of this paper is the fact our glucose sensor remains insensitive to tissue encapsulation for over 500 days. That’s a big step from a scientific point of view, and it’s due to the sensor’s unique oxygen detection scheme,” said UC San Diego Bioengineering Professor David Gough, the first author on the paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Glucose and oxygen from the surrounding tissue diffuse to the sensor, where the enzyme glucose oxidase carries out a chemical reaction in which oxygen is consumed in proportion to how much glucose is present. The remaining oxygen is measured and compared to the baseline oxygen recorded by a nearly identical oxygen reference sensor. The reduced oxygen signal compared to background oxygen signal reflects the glucose concentration. The effects of exercise and changes in local blood flow to the tissues are also largely subtracted out by the differential oxygen sensing system, which includes the pair of sens
