A painful sensor change in the middle of the night is routine for many people with Type 1 diabetes. Two Canadian researchers say they are working on a way around that.

Mahla Poudineh at the University of Waterloo and Leyla Soleymani at McMaster University have developed a wearable device called the Aptalyzer, a microneedle patch they say can track molecules in the body in real time without the pain of current continuous glucose monitors.

The pair have also launched a company, Aptec Health, to try to bring the technology to market.

For the roughly 300,000 Canadians with Type 1 diabetes, glucose monitoring is a constant task. The story says the average person living with Type 1 diabetes makes around 180 decisions a day to regulate blood sugar. If blood sugar drops too low, it can lead to loss of consciousness and death if untreated. If it rises too high, it can trigger diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition in which the blood becomes acidic.

Current continuous glucose monitors were first approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1999 and licensed in Canada in 2017. But Poudineh said they offer only a narrow slice of information.

Poudineh, an associate professor in electrical and computer engineering, said her interest in the work is personal because diabetes runs in her family and her mother has Type 2 diabetes.

Poudineh and Soleymani say their patch can track glucose, ketones and cardiac troponin. Ketones can signal insulin problems, and troponin is a marker of heart damage that appears in the blood during heart attacks.

To Poudineh and Soleymani, those markers are only the start. “We have something unique,” says Soleymani. “We think we can do something that other people can’t do.”

Poudineh grew up in Iran and said she originally wanted to study medicine. “I always wanted to be a medical doctor,” she says.

Instead, she completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at the University of Tehran, then moved to Canada in 2012 for a PhD at the University of Toronto. There, she worked in labs led by Ted Sargent and Shana Kelley on “lab on chip” devices designed to detect circulating tumour cells.

Soleymani, who was also born in Iran and immigrated to Canada in the 1990s, took a similar path into engineering after studying at McGill University and the University of Southern California. She joined the Sargent and Kelley groups in Toronto in 2006 to work on rapid diagnostics using nanomaterials.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I liked chemistry, I liked biology, I liked all sciences,” she says.

The two first met through that research network and later reconnected in 2016, when Poudineh filled in for Soleymani’s supervisor at a conference in Philadelphia. “I got to spend time with Mahla more intimately,” says Soleymani.

Poudineh later returned to Canada and launched the IDEATION Lab at Waterloo, where her team started work on a microneedle patch to continuously monitor glucose and ketones.

The patch is about the size of a fingernail. Its microneedles are less than 1 millimetre long, compared with the 3 to 4 millimetre needle used in current continuous glucose monitors. Made from hydrogel, the microneedles pierce the skin and absorb interstitial fluid.

“They’re very compatible with the skin,” says Poudineh, “unlike the solid needles currently used by continuous glucose monitors.”

That work drew funding from Breakthrough T1D, which awarded Poudineh and her research team more than $1.3 million to help develop the device, plus another $199,000 last year to improve compatibility with automated insulin-delivery systems.

Lara Green, national director of research partnerships and programs at Breakthrough T1D’s Canadian branch, said ketone monitoring is a major gap in care. “Ketones aren’t dangerous to somebody who doesn’t have diabetes because the body will compensate,” says Green.

For someone with Type 1 diabetes, she said the risks are much more serious. “It gets scary quickly,” adds Green. “Diabetic ketoacidosis will put you in the hospital – could be an ICU stay, could mean coma, could mean death.”

Catherine Goulet-Delorme, a nurse clinician and national manager of medical affairs at Breakthrough T1D, said there are currently no continuous ketone monitors on the Canadian market. People with Type 1 diabetes must rely on blood or urine tests.

Poudineh wanted to push the technology beyond glucose and ketones into proteins, hormones and inflammatory markers. That led her to Soleymani’s work on aptamers, synthetic molecules that can bind to a wider range of targets than enzymes.

In 2021, the two joined forces for the Canadian Space Agency’s Deep Space Healthcare Challenge. They proposed a patch that combined Poudineh’s microneedle platform with Soleymani’s biosensing system to monitor troponin.

They received $30,000 for the idea. In 2024, they launched Aptec Health.

In March, they published a paper showing that the Aptalyzer patch tracked rising and falling troponin levels in living animals in real time.

Commercializing the device will be difficult. Andy Stewart of the Diagnostic Consulting Group, who is advising Aptec Health, said the next stage will require major funding and regulatory approvals in Canada and the United States.

“That’s just the nature of it,” Stewart says.

He said the company faces the same basic outcomes as many diagnostic startups. “They’re either going to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, get acquired, or cease to exist.”

Stewart said he remains impressed by how far they have already come. “I tell them, ‘Don’t tell people you’re a startup,’” says Stewart. “[They’re] so much further ahead than many equivalent startups.”

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