This is very interesting. I know what i would choose as a device if someone was willing to fund it – something to filter out preservative from insulin prior to injection.
Insulin grows bacteria quite easily. Pork and beef insulins are relatively stable but still need phenols to preserve them. Human insulin is less stable and needs more phenols and analogue insulin is very unstable and needs a lot of preservative.
It is widely documented that phenols are toxic to humans. Their use in a laboratory was banned years ago. We do have a mechanism to clear them from the body as some foods are broken down into phenols, tomatoes for instance, but the enzyme which does this is not in plentiful supply. We diabetics have phenols dripped into us day and night for the rest of our lifetime.
Some of the complications of diabetes could be attributed wholly or in part to their use.
Now for another story – when artificial human growth hormone was first developed to help children with growth problems, some of them reacted to it. It was decided by the manufacturer to try and remove the phenols from the growth hormone, and they approached a Swedish scientist to come up with something. He developed a tiny filter which fits into a needle and which would filter out all the phenols JUST prior to injection – so the hormone benefited from
being stabilised and preserved , but the user would be protected from the phenols. But then they realised that they could just dry the growth hormone, it doesn’t lose efficacy dried, and it could be mixed with water just before injecting just like glucagon is mixed. So his invention was never taken up and he has not been able to interest anyone in it. He is amazed that diabetics are subjected to phenols all the time, and cannot understand why his invention has not been used. Well – the pharmaceutical people objected saying that insulin in suspension could not be filtered etc but he came up with an answer to that too.
I would be very interested in a cannula fitted with this device. There are ;