No, this isn’t a luxury line of diabetes test strips.
In Bangalore, India, silk is abundant and inexpensive, which has led Achira Labs to take advantage of the resource by weaving it into the test strips.
People with diabetes will use the strips the same way the would the paper or plastic variety – prick their finger, put a drop of blood on the strip and feed it into a glucose reader.
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The new strips will become available this year, and they are actually easier to manufacture than other glucose strips, as NPR explained:
Plastic and paper strips are typically sprayed with enzymes that break down blood sugar into electricity. Then a machine has to embed electrodes in the material, so the electrical signals can be transmitted into the glucose meter. Achira’s silk sensors only require the spray. The coated threads can conduct the electrochemical signals.
Those silk sensors would meet the FDA’s stringent standards for detecting blood sugar, says MIT chemical engineer Patrick Doyle, who serves as an unpaid adviser for Achira.
Not only are the strips easier to manufacture and equally as effective, they cost less. Mithila Azad, director of Achira’s fabric diagnostics division, says the silk strips will cost one-third to one-quarter of the price for paper or plastic strips.
The price point is especially critical in India, which has the second highest number of diabetes cases in the world – 66.8 million – behind China. A low-income Indian family supporting a diabetic relative may spend up to 25 percent of its income on care, according to the World Health Organization, while a similar family in the U.S. might spend around 10 percent.
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The Achira Labs team will set out this spring to find women weavers for hubs in the state Tamil Nadu – one in 10 people have diabetes there. This weaver search is being funded by a $100,000 grant from Grand Challenges Canada.
These new strips, however, will not be available in the U.S. because of the high price of silk importation.