In-vivo studies for a quantum optical non-invasive glucose sensor

迫切需要负担得起和可获得的技术，帮助及早诊断医疗状况，通过减少现有和未来的疾病负担，防止健康不良，确保每个人都能健康长寿。这些类型的解决方案对于监测长期健康状况同样重要，这些健康状况可能很复杂，需要密切管理，以确保不会对个人健康产生负面影响，并减少对医疗保健提供者资源的影响；对于日益普遍的长期疾病，如糖尿病，这是一个当前的问题。目前，全球有4.63亿糖尿病患者，预计到2045年将达到7亿。为了管理自己的病情，糖尿病患者必须通过频繁的血糖测量来保持密切的血糖控制。然而，目前最先进的解决方案--手指挑刺试验和连续血糖监测仪(CGM)--不支持这一点。这两种解决方案都有其局限性，例如干扰日常生活的痛苦测量、缺乏可重用性、低糖浓度下测量精度不高、皮肤刺激性、用户佩戴疲劳以及成本高昂的障碍。最终，这些解决方案会阻止人们定期进行血糖测量，这是良好糖尿病管理的核心。需要可获得和用户友好的解决方案，鼓励频繁的测量，以支持更好的管理实践，这将减少并发症的可能性，并减少糖尿病对个人和医疗保健提供者的影响，如NHS。NHS花费GB 10B(约占年度预算的10%)来处理糖尿病的治疗和并发症。其中，c.GB 3B用于治疗糖尿病相关并发症和纠正糖尿病管理不善引起的问题，但用于糖尿病管理的费用低于GB 2.5B。这表明，目前最先进的技术不利于有效的糖尿病管理，我们目前的反应性方法是有缺陷的。NIQS正在开发血糖监测的未来；一种真正的非侵入性、连续和准确的血糖传感器。我们的解决方案将提供一种负担得起的、用户友好的替代方案，使我们能够采用与当前最先进的糖尿病管理相比的预防性和主动性方法。我们最近的努力最终形成了一种手持尺寸的原型，在体外研究中显示了在广泛的葡萄糖浓度范围内的高测量精度。这笔赠款将支持NIQ进入体内(人类)研究，我们更广泛的商业化努力，并加速NIQ上市。

There is a compelling need for affordable and accessible technologies that can aid in the early diagnosis of medical conditions to prevent ill-health by reducing the existing and future burden of disease, ensuring everyone can live long, healthy lives. These types of solutions are equally important for monitoring long-term health conditions that can be complex and require close management to ensure no negative impact on an individual's health, as well as reducing the impact on healthcare providers' resources; a current issue for increasingly prevalent long-term conditions, such as diabetes.Currently, there are 463M people living with diabetes worldwide and a predicted 700M by 2045\. To manage their condition, people living with diabetes must maintain close glycemic control with frequent glucose measurements. However, current state-of-the-art solutions -- finger prick tests and continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) -- do not support this. Both solutions have their limitations, such as painful measurements that are intrusive to daily life, lack of reusability, inadequate measurement accuracy at low glucose concentrations, skin-irritation, user-wear fatigue, and high-cost barriers. Ultimately, these solutions deter people from making regular glucose measurements, which is the core to good diabetes management. Accessible and user-friendly solutions that encourage frequent measurements are needed to support better management practices, which will reduce the likelihood of complications and reduce the impact of diabetes on individuals and healthcare providers, such as the NHS.The NHS spends £10B (c.10% of the annual budget) tackling the treatment and complications of diabetes. Of this, c.£3B is spent on treating diabetes-related complications and correcting the issues arising from diabetes mismanagement but less than £2.5B is spent on diabetes management. This demonstrates that current state-of-the-art technologies are not conducive to effective diabetes management and that our current reactive approach is flawed.NIQS is developing the future of glucose monitoring; a truly non-invasive, continuous, and accurate glucose sensor. Our solution will provide an affordable, user-friendly alternative which will enable us to adopt a preventative and proactive approach to diabetes management compared to the current state-of-the-art.Our recent efforts culminated in a handheld-sized prototype which demonstrated high measurement accuracy across a broad range of glucose concentrations in an ex-vivo study. This grant will support NIQS' shift into in-vivo (human) studies, our wider commercialisation efforts and accelerate NIQS to market.