PID-controller enhanced artificial β-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 β-cells that can sense glucose and transcribe insulin protein. Experimental results from Xie et al. 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 β-cell system has a major disadvantage: it is a high-dimensional dynamic system but with little tuning space. Here, we propose an analytical model of a PID-controller-based enhanced artificial β-cell design to solve this issue. Our numerical simulations show that a model of PID-controlled engineered artificial β-cells can shut down production of insulin in time and maintain a proper glycemia level, in addition to adding more tuning space. These enhanced models of PID-controller-based artificial β-cell are thus able to perform better in regulating glucose levels in Type 1 diabetic mice compared with artificial β-cells without PID-control.