Medical Breakthrough '08: 24/7 Blood Sugar Test

Testing your blood sugar may soon be as convenient as checking the time.

Diabetics may be able to say buh-bye to finger-pricking when checking blood sugar. New monitors, like the one being developed by Gerard Cote at Texas A&M, require no blood and offer more certainty. In Cote's model, a sheath of tiny fluorescent particles, smaller than a strand of human hair, is inserted into a diabetic patient's wrist. The sheath is invisible, but when you shine a small laser on it, it glows and changes colors in response to deviations in blood sugar. A wristwatch-like device provides a digital readout of glucose levels and alerts the person to dangerous dips or spikes. Houston-based BioTex is also developing a model using similar technology. 5 years