PID-controller enhanced artificial beta-cells

Conventional management of diabetes via injection or external insulin pumps suffers from inconvenience and inability to accurately maintain blood glucose levels. A potential solution to these problems consists of implanting synthetic artificial {beta}-cells that can sense glucose and transcribe insulin protein. We focus on one such artificial {beta}-cell recently described in the work of Xie et al. Experimental results show these cells are able to release insulin and somewhat improve postprandial glucose levels in diabetic mice. However, they fail to achieve the degree of glucose regulation as in healthy mice. In our analysis, we explain that this artificial {beta}-cell system has a major disadvantage: it is a high-dimensional dynamic system but with little tuning space. Here, we propose a PID-controller-based enhanced artificial {beta}-cell design to solve this issue. Our results based on an analytical model and numerical simulations show that the computational method of PID-control can enhance engineered artificial {beta}-cells, such that they could perform better in regulating glucose levels in Type 1 diabetic mice compared with artificial {beta}-cells without PID-control: they could shut down the production of insulin in time and maintain a proper glycemia level, and there is more tuning space for artificial {beta}-cells with PID control.