By KIM BELLARD

One of my frequent laments is that here we are, a quarter of the way into the 21^st century, yet too much of our health care system still looks like the 20^th century, and not enough like the 22^nd century. It’s too slow, too reactive, too imprecise, and uses too much brute force. I want a health care system that seems more futuristic, that does things more elegantly.

So here are three examples of the kinds of things that give me hope, in rough order of when they might be ready for prime time:

Floss sensor: You know you’re supposed to floss every day, right? And you know that your oral health is connected to your overall health, in a number of ways, right? So some smart people at Tufts University thought, hmm, perhaps we can help connect those dots.

 “It started in a collaboration with several departments across Tufts, examining how stress and other cognitive states affect problem solving and learning,” said Sameer Sonkusale, professor of electrical and computer engineering. “We didn’t want measurement to create an additional source of stress, so we thought, can we make a sensing device that becomes part of your day-to-day routine? Cortisol is a stress marker found in saliva, so flossing seemed like a natural fit to take a daily sample.”

The result: “a saliva-sensing dental floss looks just like a common floss pick, with the string stretched across two prongs extending from a flat plastic handle, all about the size of your index finger.”

It uses a technology called electropolymerized molecularly imprinted polymers (eMIPs) to detect the cortisol. “The eMIP approach is a game changer,” said Professor Sonkusale. “Biosensors have typically been developed using antibodies or other receptors that pick up the molecule of interest. Once a marker is found, a lot of work has to go into bioengineering the receiving molecule attached to the sensor. eMIP does not rely on a lot of investment in making antibodies or receptors. If you discover a new marker for stress or any other disease or condition, you can just create a polymer cast in a very short period of time.”

The sensor is designed to track rather to diagnose, but the scientists are optimistic that the approach can be used to track other conditions, such as oestrogen for fertility tracking, glucose for diabetes monitoring, or markers for cancer. They also hope to have a sensor that can track multiple conditions, “for more accurate monitoring of stress, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other conditions.” 

They believe that their sensor has comparable accuracy to the best performing sensors currently available, and are working on a start-up to commercialize their approach.

Nano-scale biosensor: Flossing is all well and good, but many of us are not as diligent about it as we should be, so, hey, what about sensors inside us that do the tracking without us having to do anything? That’s what a team at Stanford are suggesting in A biochemical sensor with continuous extended stability in vivo, published in Nature.

The researchers say:

The development of biosensors that can detect specific analytes continuously, in vivo, in real time has proven difficult due to biofouling, probe degradation and signal drift that often occur in vivo. By drawing inspiration from intestinal mucosa that can protect host cell receptors in the presence of the gut microbiome, we develop a synthetic biosensor that can continuously detect specific target molecules in vivo.

“We needed a material system that could sense the target while protecting the molecular switches, and that’s when I thought, wait, how does biology solve this problem?” said Yihang Chen, the first author of the paper. Their modular biosensor, called the Stable Electrochemical Nanostructured Sensor for Blood In situ Tracking (SENSBIT) system, can survive more than a week in live rats and a month in human serum.