Fluorescence lights the way to improving diabetes care

The continuous monitoring of blood glucose levels for better management of diabetes is one of the grand challenges for sensing in the 21st century. Despite huge global investment this goal still remains elusive. In this talk I will review the fundamental issues surrounding the difficulty of in vivo glucose measurement and how spectroscopy and imagingare helping the research path to finding a workable sensor based on fluorescence. I will summarise some of the fluorescence methods tried so far, the potential advantages fluorescence lifetime measurements can bring, and describe promising sensors based on glucose/galactose binding protein labelled with environmentally sensitive fluorescent probes. I will include details of their design, characterization and specificity.