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Record W4409059201 · doi:10.1038/s41467-025-58278-4

Catechol-based chemistry for hypoglycemia-responsive delivery of zinc-glucagon via hydrogel-based microneedle patch technology

2025· article· en· W4409059201 on OpenAlexafffund
Amin GhavamiNejad, Jackie Fule Liu, Sako Mirzaie, Brian Lu, Melisa Samarikhalaj, Adria Giacca, Xiao Yu Wu

Bibliographic record

VenueNature Communications · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics
TopicAdvancements in Transdermal Drug Delivery
Canadian institutionsDiabetes CanadaUniversity of Toronto
FundersPfizer CanadaLeona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable TrustCanadian Network for Research and Innovation in Machining Technology, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaMitacsUniversity of TorontoNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaPfizer
KeywordsCatecholGlucagonChemistrySelf-healing hydrogelsZincHypoglycemiaNanotechnologyBiochemistryMedicineMaterials scienceEndocrinologyOrganic chemistryInsulin

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Hypoglycemia is a serious and potentially life-threatening condition for people with insulin-dependent diabetes. To provide a safeguard against hypoglycemia, we introduce a “smart” microneedle (MN) patch that senses glucose levels and delivers a blood glucose-raising agent (Zinc-Glucagon (Z-GCN)) in response to hypoglycemia. Herein, we describe the use of catechol and boronic acid chemistry to design a self-crosslinkable hydrogel-based MN that stimulates the release of Z-GCN during hypoglycemia. In this design, the catechol groups bind to Z-GCN through metal-ligand complexation. At hyperglycemia, boronic acids react with glucose to generate cyclic boronate esters. As the glucose concentration decreases, the boronic acid groups dissociate and are favored over Z-GCN in binding with catechol, which promotes the release of Z-GCN. We fully characterize the fabricated MN in vitro. Moreover, we further evaluate the MN and demonstrate the in vivo glucose-responsive delivery of Z-GCN from the patch. We also show its effectiveness in preventing hypoglycemia for up to 6 h in type 1 diabetic male rats against two consecutive insulin overdose challenges. Since many proteins/peptides have a high binding affinity to metal ions, the introduced mechanism driven by the competitive binding of catechol-metal ions has great implications in drug delivery applications of various protein/peptide-based therapeutics. Hypoglycemia is a serious and potentially life-threatening condition for people with insulin dependent diabetes, but preventative hypoglycemia therapies are elusive. Here, the authors report the use of catechol and boronic acid chemistry to design a self-crosslinkable hydrogel-based microneedle patch that delivers Zinc-Glucagon at low glucose levels and prevents insulin-induced hypoglycemia.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Research integrity
Consensus categoriesResearch integrity
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.216
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.000
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.042
GPT teacher head0.417
Teacher spread0.376 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designBench or experimental
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations20
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

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