Rising to the Top

Science and Technology @ UCSB

Here’s a challenge: Build a pump that can deliver a drug to you automatically when you’re sick. Now make it smaller than a penny. And make it accurate enough that you can guarantee it won’t pump one microliter more than prescribed amount (otherwise it might kill you). Now make it cheap enough to mass-produce for millions of people and make sure it runs on a tiny battery.Think you can do it?
UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering postdoctoral researcher Karen Scida has an idea, and it’s promising enough that the deans of the College of Engineering and the Division of Mathematical, Life & Physical Sciences at UCSB have awarded her this year’s Otis Williams Postdoctoral Fellowship. The Otis Williams Fund at the Santa Barbara Foundation provides support for young Ph.D. scientists to work at the interface of biology and engineering. For her fellowship, Scida has a plan to engineer a solution to one of the world’s largest epidemics: diabetes.
The human body runs on the sugar glucose. An elaborate distribution system turns the variable source of glucose (the food you eat) into a constant source of fuel to power your cells. Glucose is extracted from food by the digestive organs  — mouth, stomach and intestines — and is then dynamically distributed throughout the blood stream to places where it’s needed — your brain when you’re reading, your muscles when you’re running, your stomach when you’re digesting. When glucose isn’t needed, it’s shuttled to short- and long-term storage facilities, the liver and fat tissue, respectively, for later use.
The pancreas is a critical regulator of this dynamic control system. It tells the organs when to accept or pass on circulating glucose by secreting hormones, including insulin, into the bloodstream.
Unfortunately, in diabetes, the pancreatic control system is broken. People with diabetes need ...

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