11 ms·

Alphabet unit halts glucose-detecting contact lens project

120 points by sonabinu 8y ago

ipsum2 8y ago
Good on Alphabet for 1) releasing their findings and 2) not continuing the experiment for publicity purposes. I'm wondering though, even if this were a success, how many people would it help? How big is the intersection of people who use contact lens (i.e. can afford them and don't find them annoying) & have diabetes? In the US, there are 45 million people who wear contacts [0] and 30 million with diabetes [1]. Naively assuming independence, that means potentially 4 million people would benefit from this. Seems like small potatoes to Alphabet, even if they could capture 50% of the market. 0: https://www.cdc.gov/contactlenses/fast-facts.html https://www.cdc.gov/contactlenses/fast-facts.html 1: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p0718-diabetes-report.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p0718-diabetes-repor...
- westoncb 8y ago
  I suspect the number would be quite a bit larger. You have to consider how many with diabetes would be willing to wear contact lenses, and if you consider what the tradeoffs involved are, I think you'd find it's a rather large proportion. Managing blood sugar how we do it now is a far larger bother than wearing contact lenses. I would guess that most diabetics who could afford them and did not have some physical aversion would use the lens monitors. The alternative is primarily: draw blood from your finger every time you want to know where your blood sugar is. (There are other 'continuous' glucose monitors, but you have to keep a needle in you all day, and my understanding is they are inaccurate enough that you still often need to check sugar by drawing blood.)
  - modin 8y ago
    > The alternative is primarily: draw blood from your finger every time you want to know where your blood sugar is. (There are other 'continuous' glucose monitors, but you have to keep a needle in you all day, and my understanding is they are inaccurate enough that you still often need to check sugar by drawing blood.) I have been using Freestyle Libre for the last two years and only picked my fingers a handful of times in that period. It’s very accurate for me, perhaps a few (10-ish) minutes delay at most compared to fingers and toes, on par with measuring in the arm. And it’s a small fibre, not a needle that’s in the arm for two weeks at a time, doesn’t hurt at all. The development in diabetes treatment have been tremendous the last years, which might be another reason as of why Alphabet is discontinuing this project.
    - westoncb 8y ago
      Hmm, maybe time for me to look into CGMs again :) Any recommendation for how to go about getting the Freestyle Libre? I don't have insurance, so I'm guessing it's gonna be prohibitively expensive...
      - inetsee 8y ago
        I'd have to double check, but my recollection the last I looked into the Freestyle Libre monitor was that the Reader cost about $150, and the monitors (the things that attach to your arm) cost somewhere around $100 to $150 a month. Not cheap, but significantly less expensive than the older style monitors, and reports are that the Freestyle Libre is much less uncomfortable then the old style monitors.
  - gdy 8y ago
    Freestyle Libre doesn't require drawing blood. It isn't a CGM though because it won't alert you when the blood sugar level is not in the normal range.
  - sodosopa 8y ago
    It’s not really a needle but a cannula but close enough. I don’t like being tethered between my sensor and a device. If I could be wireless I’d be more interested but the current devices are not there yet. I’d rather see work toward the digital pancreas improve. Maybe in 5 years, but I’ve been saying that for 20 years.
  - zoomablemind 8y ago
    There're other contact-lense type efforts underway, listed in another article on the OP subject [1]. It's still a question whether a tiny layer of tear could yield a stable gluco measure. [1]: https://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/alphabets-verily-shelves-glucose-sensing-contact-lens-project-novartis https://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/alphabets-verily-shel...
- gumby 8y ago
  > Good on Alphabet for ... 2) not continuing the experiment for publicity purposes. They announced that they were starting their project for publicity purposes! Typically scientists announce their results, not getting a grant.
pm90 8y ago
The actual blog post is much more informative: https://blog.verily.com/2018/11/update-on-our-smart-lens-program-with.html?m=1 https://blog.verily.com/2018/11/update-on-our-smart-lens-pro... Sounds like they couldn’t, with today’s technology, measure glucose levels to the accuracy required for medical devices. But will continue work on measuring other things with those lenses. I don’t know why the negative tone of the article. Sounds like they tried something and demonstrated their specific solution didn’t work. Most research experiments generally don’t.
- belltaco 8y ago
  Maybe because it was hyped up a lot, including on here.
  - Steko 8y ago
    The original announcement thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7073373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7073373 2016 update on Googlebet/Verily vaporware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845804
- aaavl2821 8y ago
  A lot of people in the scientific community had suggested for a while that glucose levels in eye fluid were not sufficiently correlated to blood glucose levels for glucose measured in tear fluid to be clinically useful. So even if you could detect glucose in eye fluid, it wouldn't help you manage disease. In the eyes of some this was an obvious limitation that the company brushed aside, and there was a fair amount of hype around it, so there were some ppl calling it vaporware Although some of the core tech around engineering all the sensors, battery, Bluetooth etc into a contact lens is pretty cool. There are a lot of patents from the inventor, brian Otis (who wrote the blog post), if you want to take a look. But based on the blog post it seems like they were having trouble measuring glucose in tear fluid, which is one step upstream from the aforementioned issue around lack of correlation btw eye and blood glucose. If you can't accurately measure the analyte it doesn't really matter if it's correlated w disease
cycrutchfield 8y ago
>Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment. For example, we found that interference from biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film. In addition, our clinical studies have demonstrated challenges in achieving the steady state conditions necessary for reliable tear glucose readings. Why wasn't this clinical work done prior to any work on "smart lenses"? This is like Theranos trying to build all this equipment to support fingerprick blood tests only to find out that venous blood is superior for a lot of things that you want to measure.
- azurezyq 8y ago
  It seems that it may work somehow in controlled environment but hit hard rocks when applied to more real patients. It never reached the stage of mass deployment, which is different from Thernos. Well, medical research is always difficult.
raverbashing 8y ago
I see this in a positive light. They tested, it didn't work as well as they expected and hence they're abandoning it. Sounds like what Theranos should have done
- umichguy 8y ago
  Theranos should be a case study of how not to, for a long time to come in tech firms - especially, those dealing with real-life humans in the healthcare arena.
  - atq2119 8y ago
    Even more, Theranos should be a case study for investors. People in the industry were calling out Theranos' nonsense for many years before the whole thing finally collapsed. I'd really like to know if investors were just oblivious or if they genuinely believed that Holmes could fake it until she made it.
    - zaidf 8y ago
      People in the industry were calling out Theranos' nonsense for many years People in the industry enabled Theranos. You don’t make deals with Walgreens and Safeway without people in the industry backing you. Of course, there were fair number of doubters. But when the likes of Mayo Clinic lend their name to anything from Theranos, it’s safe to say an important part of the industry backed it.
    - raverbashing 8y ago
      Given most of them have f.you money and no interest in thinking about those pesky details like physics and chemistry (hello ubeam) I doubt they will worry about this for more than 5 minutes.
    - mcguire 8y ago
      Eh, they were shorts, pushing their negative spin. /s
  - 706f6f70 8y ago
trhway 8y ago
while glucose-detecting lens are cooler and would be very convenient, there seems to be breath analyzing devices development which does show very good promise - i.e. the acetone in breath seems to be an established correlate and the work seems mostly about building convenient device (for people who don't already have a dog performing such a service :) and for that work the product development power of Google money i think would help very much.
tlubinski 8y ago
With DiaMonTech (www.diamontech.com) we are also working on a non-invasive blood sugar monitor. Google lens was always a discussion with the interested parties (e.g. investors). Our take was that it is hard to detect the small concentration of glucose in tear fluids but even if you manage to do that, the real problem would be that there is always a delay (between 30 and 100 minutes) until changes in the blood sugar level are seen in tear fluid. So for people with fast changing blood sugar levels (i.e. diabetics) the needed information comes too late.
swedish_mafia 8y ago
Was rapid evaluation team getting neck massages for positive rapid evaluations?
londons_explore 8y ago
> Verily cited insufficient consistency in the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose For a research project, they should have measured that in week one, and canned the project just 3 weeks in after a bunch of test results on swabs from peoples eyes couldn't be closely correlated with blood glucose after controlling for temperature and humidity in an excel spreadsheet. How did it take years for them to figure this out? Smells of bad management to me - the engineers saying 'It's so nearly working!!' for years just to keep their jobs, and management believing them.
- petra 8y ago
  But Google isn't a startup. They have stocks in the stock market. What's the cumulative effect of this type of project management on their stock ? is it possible it's positive ?
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > How did it take years for them to figure this out? They thought they could beat it by measuring over long periods of time. This didn’t work. Medical research and scientific envelope-pushing is hard. This was a risky project that failed; everyone walks away with superior knowledge and nobody was harmed.
- bitpush 8y ago
  Wow. I knew that HN commentators were over their head, but this is probably the most outrageous one I've seen. I sure hope none of the companies, startups included, dont give up after a week (or three) of testing on the projects they are working on.
  - wild_preference 8y ago
    These types of people confuse the ease of pooping on something with the viability and worthwhileness of that thing.
bunnycorn 8y ago
Doesn't matter, what matters is that they published the story with a picture (a stupid picture, that there's no way it would work without alien technology) in hundreds of websites, generating buzz and a rise in their stock value due to investors goodwill. This is why I dislike Google. If you read the news, you would think they have the future in their hands, but after 10 years of Android, many more of YouTube and Gmail, and only one thing works, only one thing brings them 90% of their revenue: advertising. And boy do they sell advertising, but they also know how to advertise themselves... Google is like a children whose parents give free access to chocolate (ad business money). Why would a child eat anything else besides chocolate? It's tasty, it's sweet, it's easy to eat. And it turns out that engineering something is not as easy as turning up ads on YouTube.
- patrickaljord 8y ago
  It's hard to create a multi-billion business like ads. It's not surprising they could not and probably will never be able to replicate that success. There's a handful of success like these in a century and it rarely comes twice from the same company. I agree with hype of their futurist stuff, they should tone it down if it's just for buzz.
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    It's hard now when Google have their market position. For Google it was easy to grab the low hanging fruit. I wonder if former competitors like Altavista just never though of spying on their users and selling the info or if they assumed it would be illegal and didn't do it?
    - josephjrobison 8y ago
      Yea I thought something similar - executives at the older companies feared jail time for doing some of those tactics so they stayed away. Of course there’s always lawyers to read the fine print, but still...
      - 8y ago
gwern 8y ago
> In a blog update, Verily cited here insufficient consistency in the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. Continuing the extremely long and varied history of failures in non-invasive glucose testing, especially those attempting to measure proxies rather than the blood itself: See John Smith's _The Pursuit of Noninvasive Glucose Blood Tests: "Hunting the Deceitful Turkey"_ http://www.mendosa.com/noninvasive_glucose.pdf http://www.mendosa.com/noninvasive_glucose.pdf
joshstrange 8y ago
Honestly I think it wasn't a great tech idea/application in the first place. A lower profile Dexcom [0] would be the better option. My boyfriend has one of these and he can leave it on for 10 days. I take my contacts out at night and normally if I don't leave the house I just use glasses (so does he). His dexcom can monitor 24/7 where as contacts don't work that way. Also before you say "they have contacts you can sleep in and leave in your eyes for a month" I know, but some people's eyes are more prone to infection or have other issues that don't allow for this. [1] http://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/CompanyHeader/headerdxcm.png http://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/CompanyHeader/header...

120 points by sonabinu 8y ago

Good on Alphabet for 1) releasing their findings and 2) not continuing the experiment for publicity purposes. I'm wondering though, even if this were a success, how many people would it help? How big is the intersection of people who use contact lens (i.e. can afford them and don't find them annoying) & have diabetes? In the US, there are 45 million people who wear contacts [0] and 30 million with diabetes [1]. Naively assuming independence, that means potentially 4 million people would benefit from this. Seems like small potatoes to Alphabet, even if they could capture 50% of the market. 0: https://www.cdc.gov/contactlenses/fast-facts.html https://www.cdc.gov/contactlenses/fast-facts.html 1: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p0718-diabetes-report.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p0718-diabetes-repor...

westoncb 8y ago
I suspect the number would be quite a bit larger. You have to consider how many with diabetes would be willing to wear contact lenses, and if you consider what the tradeoffs involved are, I think you'd find it's a rather large proportion. Managing blood sugar how we do it now is a far larger bother than wearing contact lenses. I would guess that most diabetics who could afford them and did not have some physical aversion would use the lens monitors. The alternative is primarily: draw blood from your finger every time you want to know where your blood sugar is. (There are other 'continuous' glucose monitors, but you have to keep a needle in you all day, and my understanding is they are inaccurate enough that you still often need to check sugar by drawing blood.)
- modin 8y ago
  > The alternative is primarily: draw blood from your finger every time you want to know where your blood sugar is. (There are other 'continuous' glucose monitors, but you have to keep a needle in you all day, and my understanding is they are inaccurate enough that you still often need to check sugar by drawing blood.) I have been using Freestyle Libre for the last two years and only picked my fingers a handful of times in that period. It’s very accurate for me, perhaps a few (10-ish) minutes delay at most compared to fingers and toes, on par with measuring in the arm. And it’s a small fibre, not a needle that’s in the arm for two weeks at a time, doesn’t hurt at all. The development in diabetes treatment have been tremendous the last years, which might be another reason as of why Alphabet is discontinuing this project.
  - westoncb 8y ago
    Hmm, maybe time for me to look into CGMs again :) Any recommendation for how to go about getting the Freestyle Libre? I don't have insurance, so I'm guessing it's gonna be prohibitively expensive...
    - inetsee 8y ago
      I'd have to double check, but my recollection the last I looked into the Freestyle Libre monitor was that the Reader cost about $150, and the monitors (the things that attach to your arm) cost somewhere around $100 to $150 a month. Not cheap, but significantly less expensive than the older style monitors, and reports are that the Freestyle Libre is much less uncomfortable then the old style monitors.
- gdy 8y ago
  Freestyle Libre doesn't require drawing blood. It isn't a CGM though because it won't alert you when the blood sugar level is not in the normal range.
- sodosopa 8y ago
  It’s not really a needle but a cannula but close enough. I don’t like being tethered between my sensor and a device. If I could be wireless I’d be more interested but the current devices are not there yet. I’d rather see work toward the digital pancreas improve. Maybe in 5 years, but I’ve been saying that for 20 years.
- zoomablemind 8y ago
  There're other contact-lense type efforts underway, listed in another article on the OP subject [1]. It's still a question whether a tiny layer of tear could yield a stable gluco measure. [1]: https://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/alphabets-verily-shelves-glucose-sensing-contact-lens-project-novartis https://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/alphabets-verily-shel...
gumby 8y ago
> Good on Alphabet for ... 2) not continuing the experiment for publicity purposes. They announced that they were starting their project for publicity purposes! Typically scientists announce their results, not getting a grant.

pm90 8y ago

The actual blog post is much more informative: https://blog.verily.com/2018/11/update-on-our-smart-lens-program-with.html?m=1 https://blog.verily.com/2018/11/update-on-our-smart-lens-pro... Sounds like they couldn’t, with today’s technology, measure glucose levels to the accuracy required for medical devices. But will continue work on measuring other things with those lenses. I don’t know why the negative tone of the article. Sounds like they tried something and demonstrated their specific solution didn’t work. Most research experiments generally don’t.

belltaco 8y ago
Maybe because it was hyped up a lot, including on here.
- Steko 8y ago
  The original announcement thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7073373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7073373 2016 update on Googlebet/Verily vaporware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845804
aaavl2821 8y ago
A lot of people in the scientific community had suggested for a while that glucose levels in eye fluid were not sufficiently correlated to blood glucose levels for glucose measured in tear fluid to be clinically useful. So even if you could detect glucose in eye fluid, it wouldn't help you manage disease. In the eyes of some this was an obvious limitation that the company brushed aside, and there was a fair amount of hype around it, so there were some ppl calling it vaporware Although some of the core tech around engineering all the sensors, battery, Bluetooth etc into a contact lens is pretty cool. There are a lot of patents from the inventor, brian Otis (who wrote the blog post), if you want to take a look. But based on the blog post it seems like they were having trouble measuring glucose in tear fluid, which is one step upstream from the aforementioned issue around lack of correlation btw eye and blood glucose. If you can't accurately measure the analyte it doesn't really matter if it's correlated w disease

cycrutchfield 8y ago

>Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment. For example, we found that interference from biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film. In addition, our clinical studies have demonstrated challenges in achieving the steady state conditions necessary for reliable tear glucose readings. Why wasn't this clinical work done prior to any work on "smart lenses"? This is like Theranos trying to build all this equipment to support fingerprick blood tests only to find out that venous blood is superior for a lot of things that you want to measure.

azurezyq 8y ago
It seems that it may work somehow in controlled environment but hit hard rocks when applied to more real patients. It never reached the stage of mass deployment, which is different from Thernos. Well, medical research is always difficult.

raverbashing 8y ago

I see this in a positive light. They tested, it didn't work as well as they expected and hence they're abandoning it. Sounds like what Theranos should have done

umichguy 8y ago
Theranos should be a case study of how not to, for a long time to come in tech firms - especially, those dealing with real-life humans in the healthcare arena.
- atq2119 8y ago
  Even more, Theranos should be a case study for investors. People in the industry were calling out Theranos' nonsense for many years before the whole thing finally collapsed. I'd really like to know if investors were just oblivious or if they genuinely believed that Holmes could fake it until she made it.
  - zaidf 8y ago
    People in the industry were calling out Theranos' nonsense for many years People in the industry enabled Theranos. You don’t make deals with Walgreens and Safeway without people in the industry backing you. Of course, there were fair number of doubters. But when the likes of Mayo Clinic lend their name to anything from Theranos, it’s safe to say an important part of the industry backed it.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    Given most of them have f.you money and no interest in thinking about those pesky details like physics and chemistry (hello ubeam) I doubt they will worry about this for more than 5 minutes.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    Eh, they were shorts, pushing their negative spin. /s
- 706f6f70 8y ago

trhway 8y ago

while glucose-detecting lens are cooler and would be very convenient, there seems to be breath analyzing devices development which does show very good promise - i.e. the acetone in breath seems to be an established correlate and the work seems mostly about building convenient device (for people who don't already have a dog performing such a service :) and for that work the product development power of Google money i think would help very much.

tlubinski 8y ago

With DiaMonTech (www.diamontech.com) we are also working on a non-invasive blood sugar monitor. Google lens was always a discussion with the interested parties (e.g. investors). Our take was that it is hard to detect the small concentration of glucose in tear fluids but even if you manage to do that, the real problem would be that there is always a delay (between 30 and 100 minutes) until changes in the blood sugar level are seen in tear fluid. So for people with fast changing blood sugar levels (i.e. diabetics) the needed information comes too late.

swedish_mafia 8y ago

Was rapid evaluation team getting neck massages for positive rapid evaluations?

londons_explore 8y ago

> Verily cited insufficient consistency in the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose For a research project, they should have measured that in week one, and canned the project just 3 weeks in after a bunch of test results on swabs from peoples eyes couldn't be closely correlated with blood glucose after controlling for temperature and humidity in an excel spreadsheet. How did it take years for them to figure this out? Smells of bad management to me - the engineers saying 'It's so nearly working!!' for years just to keep their jobs, and management believing them.

petra 8y ago
But Google isn't a startup. They have stocks in the stock market. What's the cumulative effect of this type of project management on their stock ? is it possible it's positive ?
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> How did it take years for them to figure this out? They thought they could beat it by measuring over long periods of time. This didn’t work. Medical research and scientific envelope-pushing is hard. This was a risky project that failed; everyone walks away with superior knowledge and nobody was harmed.
bitpush 8y ago
Wow. I knew that HN commentators were over their head, but this is probably the most outrageous one I've seen. I sure hope none of the companies, startups included, dont give up after a week (or three) of testing on the projects they are working on.
- wild_preference 8y ago
  These types of people confuse the ease of pooping on something with the viability and worthwhileness of that thing.

bunnycorn 8y ago

Doesn't matter, what matters is that they published the story with a picture (a stupid picture, that there's no way it would work without alien technology) in hundreds of websites, generating buzz and a rise in their stock value due to investors goodwill. This is why I dislike Google. If you read the news, you would think they have the future in their hands, but after 10 years of Android, many more of YouTube and Gmail, and only one thing works, only one thing brings them 90% of their revenue: advertising. And boy do they sell advertising, but they also know how to advertise themselves... Google is like a children whose parents give free access to chocolate (ad business money). Why would a child eat anything else besides chocolate? It's tasty, it's sweet, it's easy to eat. And it turns out that engineering something is not as easy as turning up ads on YouTube.

patrickaljord 8y ago
It's hard to create a multi-billion business like ads. It's not surprising they could not and probably will never be able to replicate that success. There's a handful of success like these in a century and it rarely comes twice from the same company. I agree with hype of their futurist stuff, they should tone it down if it's just for buzz.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  It's hard now when Google have their market position. For Google it was easy to grab the low hanging fruit. I wonder if former competitors like Altavista just never though of spying on their users and selling the info or if they assumed it would be illegal and didn't do it?
  - josephjrobison 8y ago
    Yea I thought something similar - executives at the older companies feared jail time for doing some of those tactics so they stayed away. Of course there’s always lawyers to read the fine print, but still...
    - 8y ago

gwern 8y ago

> In a blog update, Verily cited here insufficient consistency in the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. Continuing the extremely long and varied history of failures in non-invasive glucose testing, especially those attempting to measure proxies rather than the blood itself: See John Smith's _The Pursuit of Noninvasive Glucose Blood Tests: "Hunting the Deceitful Turkey"_ http://www.mendosa.com/noninvasive_glucose.pdf http://www.mendosa.com/noninvasive_glucose.pdf

joshstrange 8y ago

Honestly I think it wasn't a great tech idea/application in the first place. A lower profile Dexcom [0] would be the better option. My boyfriend has one of these and he can leave it on for 10 days. I take my contacts out at night and normally if I don't leave the house I just use glasses (so does he). His dexcom can monitor 24/7 where as contacts don't work that way. Also before you say "they have contacts you can sleep in and leave in your eyes for a month" I know, but some people's eyes are more prone to infection or have other issues that don't allow for this. [1] http://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/CompanyHeader/headerdxcm.png http://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/CompanyHeader/header...