2023-08-22 00:24:07
▲ A research team holding a smart pill. Photo = Qijun Liu of Boston University, Maria Eugenia Inda of MIT, and Miguel Jimenez of MIT Bacteria are like small living chemical complexes. This is because it maintains complex metabolic processes to maintain life even though it is smaller than animal cells. In order to find a suitable environment for living here, it has evolved to sense light, gravity, pH, chemicals, and heat and respond appropriately.
Therefore, scientists have studied how to use bacteria as living chemical factories or living sensors. However, research on making useful substances using bacteria has achieved some results, but the bacteria sensor is just at the stage of practical use. A research team from MIT and Boston University has developed a smart tablet that uses bacteria as living sensors. The goal of the smart pill is real-time monitoring of the intestinal inflammatory response in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease.
Currently, the disease course of inflammatory bowel disease is centered on endoscopy and identification of the patient’s symptoms. However, it is difficult to receive endoscopy frequently, and the patient’s symptoms are subjective, and if the symptoms have already worsened, the inflammation is likely to be quite advanced. Substances such as nitric oxide, which are released when inflammatory bowel disease becomes severe, have a short half-life, so they cannot be identified by stool tests or general blood tests. This is the background that led the research team to develop a smart tablet that detects substances directly inside the intestine. The easy-to-swallow blueberry-sized smart pills contain batteries, microelectronics and genetically engineered bacteria.
The bacteria in the smart pill contain a gene that makes a bioluminescent substance in response to nitric oxide. Thanks to this, it is possible to monitor the level of inflammation in the intestine in real time using an inexpensive sensor that can only detect the amount of light emitted. Existing nitric oxide sensors are too large and expensive to make in pill form, making them impractical. Bacteria are cheap to manufacture because they only need to be cultured and put into smart pills. And it can be easily turned into a smart pill that can detect other substances by simply changing the gene. If it is difficult to make a micro sensor as small as a bacterium, it is a change of thinking to use the bacterium itself as a sensor.
The research team verified the safety and performance of the smart pill in an animal model using pigs. If commercialized after clinical trials, it is expected to be of great help in diagnosing and researching other diseases as well as identifying the condition of patients with inflammatory bowel disease.
Gordon Jung Science Columnist [email protected]
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