Nanomedicine - Bionanoelectronics: Bioinquiring and Bioinspired Devices - page 148

Fig. 4.26 The insulin pump

membrane of nitiol

valve

insulin from
fluid reservoir delivery

Artificial organs can be mimicked, or their functions can be reconstructed using
very advanced integrated circuits, including micro/nanofluidics. For example, an
artificial pancreas consists of two main parts. A glucose sensor implanted under the
skin will detect the extracellular level and will transmit it to a computer. A drug
delivery capsule having a microfluidic pump, as those described above, will then
deliver the necessary amount of insulin from its reservoir ( Nastruzzi et al. 2005 ).
Such an artificial pancreas is already created but still with a limited-in-time function
( Nastruzzi et al. 2005 ). A simple example of an insulin pump is described in
Fig. 4.26 . The film forming the pump takes a dome-like shape when electrically
heated. In this case, insulin from a reservoir is drawn inside the pump and is released
in the delivery tube when the film cools down. The film is termed nitinol and is an
alloy of Ni and Ti ( Schetky et al. 2003 ).
A biomimetic microsystem was recently fabricated to reconstitute the critical
functional alveolar capillarity of the human lung ( Huh et al. 2010 ). This is a first
step toward organ-on-chip.

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