Chemical-Sensing Catheters for Long-Term and Personalized Therapeutic Management

Long-term intravenous catheterization is vital for delivering chemotherapy to cancer patients and parenteral nutrition to those with intestinal failure, but it inevitably leads to complications, including metabolic disorders, bloodstream infection, liver injury, and kidney injury. Clinical monitoring methods show notable delays, while real-time blood monitoring devices fail to ensure long-term stability in vivo. Here, we present a chemical-sensing catheter that integrates multiple analyte sensors, including creatinine, taurocholic acid, bilirubin, and taurine, for real-time monitoring of complications in patients receiving long-term chemotherapy or parenteral nutrition in situ. The design of the metalgel preserves signal integrity through 1 million bending deformations, and a dual-network molecularly imprinted polymer suppresses in vivo performance degradation, enabling stable long-term operation of the chemical-sensing catheter over a 3 month implantation period. In chemotherapy and parenteral nutrition applications, early monitoring of liver and kidney injury, combined with prognostic intervention, mitigates risks such as bile stasis, hepatitis, and hepatic steatosis. With the integration of machine learning analysis of multimodal sensor data, this technology provides early prediction of complications and establishes a new paradigm for personalized therapeutic management.