Innovative Implantable Telemetric Ethanol Biosensor

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Innovative technologies for sensitive and selective monitoring of alcohol and its metabolites in humans are of continuing importance to the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse (NIAAA). Although there has been progress in developing real-time, remote sensors and systems in recent years, the performance of these systems is generally insufficient for demanding applications requiring miniaturized continuous monitoring of body functions (e.g. temperature, heart rate, etc.) along with alcohol and other possible chemical constituents while being unconstrained by conventional monitoring devices. Telesensors Inc. proposes to design, develop, fabricate, test and commercialize a miniaturized, implantable telemetric system for transducing alcohol concentrations and body temperatures in subcutaneous tissue. This system will include onboard data collection and analysis and periodic telemetric reporting of the data to a remote base station for storage and further analysis. The combination of multi-channel sensing and data collection capacity, implantability, micro-miniature size, and physiological calibration, all supported by signal processing software that tailors the measurements made to an individual's pharmacokinetics, best represents the state-of-the-art in bio-medical research sought by NIAAA. The proposed system will promote both research and clinical applications. In particular, the variety of biological signals that future researchers could choose as targets for exploiting unused data collection channels built into the. proposed system promises the opportunity to track the progression of nearly any phase of alcohol related illness. As far as is known, the approach we propose offers the only system for direct, continuous, measurement of alcohol concentrations.