UCSB Chem Engineering

Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies

Biomolecular Science and Engineering Program (BMSE)

Center for Control, Dynamical Systems, & Computation

Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Marine Science (IGPM)

Computational Science and Engineering, IGERT program

Glucose Monitoring through Meal Detection
Another study looked at using continous glucose monitoring to detect a meal. Eyal Dassau, PHD, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, said the ability to use a meal detection algorithm has safety and quality-of-life implications, particularly in children and adolescents, which is why the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation provided financial support for the study.

Adolescents often forget to bolus before eating, which results in very high blood glucose levels a couple of hours after a meal, which is something we'd like to avoid," Dr. Dassau said.

The study he presented looked at whether glucose rate-of-change data from a continuous glucose monitor could detect a meal. Dr. Dassau said the results indicated that the use of meal detection algorithm will trigger a model for predictive control of insulin dosing during a meal before there has been a major elevation in blood glucose levels. More...

Open Positions
New opportunities in the lab.  More...

Drug firm turns spotlight on basic systems biology-Nature
The pharmaceutical company Pfizer has launched a three-year, US$14-million systems-biology consortium to improve the understanding of diabetes and obesity. Systems biology uses computer-intensive data analysis to derive models about specific biological phenomena, and can be used to help study the progression of some diseases. Drug companies have traditionally shied away from it, because it can take a long time to see any financial pay-off. But in March, systems-biology research, funded in part by Merck, identified genes involved in obesity. In the new Pfizer programme, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, the University of Massachusetts, and biotechnology company Entelos based in Foster City, California, will examine the regulatory mechanisms involved in insulin signalling in fat cells.. More...