Wearable devices like smartwatches can already track heart rate, blood oxygen, and heart rate variability. Other devices go further, measuring real-time changes in blood glucose and even lactate.
Continuous lactate monitoring, for example, could give patients with post-exertional malaise objective feedback on metabolic stress, such as mitochondrial dysfunction, helping them pace more effectively and potentially reduce the severity of crashes.
Yet many other molecules that are critical to our health remain invisible in real time. Molecules that:
Must be kept in a tight equilibrium
Lack clear signs that the equilibrium has become moderately dysregulated
(When dysregulated) lead to the progression of chronic disease
A perfect example is inflammation, specifically pro-inflammatory cytokines.
These molecules fine-tune inflammatory responses to protect us from pathogens and cancer. However, prolonged inflammation can be just as harmful as an insufficient inflammatory response. One can cause autoimmunity and other chronic inflammatory conditions, while the other can impair control of infections, especially latent infections, causing serious health complications.
Imagine if we could monitor inflammation in the body in real time. It could not only help patients understand which daily-life variables modify the inflammatory burden but also produce rich, frictionless datasets that would help researchers better understand the role of inflammation in our physical and mental health.
In this article, I will describe how Northwestern University researcher Shana O. Kelley and colleagues developed a molecular-pendulum biosensor that enables continuous, real-time monitoring of key pro-inflammatory cytokines. Their work demonstrated the capability to measure interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) in living animals, marking the first time such continuous in-tissue tracking of these inflammatory markers was achieved with rapid sensor reset.
Here is how it works.
