00:00 c.u.
skin isolator being placed on arm and arm to scanner
Wide
– doctor taking blood from a patient (R-TV archive)
c.u.
blood into ampoule (R-TV archive)
Wide
– Prof. Guy entering laboratory
c.u.
“Membrane Laboratory” door
sign
Guide Voice: American comedian, Alan Sherman,
observed in one of his songs:
“You gotta have skin,
All you really need is skin
Skin's the thing that if you've got it outside
It helps keep your insides in”….
But while skin may well keep your insides in, it’s not an
impenetrable barrier. Medical practitioners have been using the
needle and syringe as a means of crossing this barrier for many
years but now researchers at the University of Bath are working on
new ways to cross the skin barrier.
00:29 SOT – Richard Guy. Professor of
Pharmaceutical Sciences, Dept of Pharmacy and
Pharmacology, University
of Bath: “The reason
that the needle works very efficiently is because you put it
directly into the blood and you pull out a blood sample, or you put
it directly into the blood and inject the drug directly into the
body and that works very efficiently, obviously. The difficulty
with it is that it requires a professional to do that, or you have
to be highly trained in order to do it correctly and it's invasive;
it's hurtful and people don't like it. So there's a big interest in
the field in trying to find non-invasive, or minimally invasive
ways to administer drugs into the body and to extract things from
the body, to the outside, for the purposes of diagnosis or
monitoring”.
01:07 Wide
– researcher attaching electrodes to subject’s
arm
c.u.
current adjustor
Wide
– subject’s arm
Still
frame – Glucowatch
Guide Voice: Though our skin provides an
effective barrier it is by no means impermeable. Iontophorosis
relies on this fact, applying a small electric current, less than
half a milliamp per square centimetre, substances can be made to
cross the skin barrier. By reversing the current, substances can be
drawn from the body, allowing samples to be taken without the use
of a syringe.
Diabetics in the UK and America are already benefiting from
Professor Guy’s research into transdermal techniques. The
“Glucowatch” monitors concentrations of glucose
continuously throughout the day –
01:44 SOT: Professor Guy -
“This is the Glucowatch here, or at least part of it, and
the business end is on the other side. Here, what would happen is
the watch would sit on the wrist of the subject in this way and
these two patches here serve two purposes, one to pass a small
current through the skin which causes the different substances to
be extracted and then the material is collected into two gels which
cover the electrodes and subsequent to the extractions a second set
of electrodes is then used to analyse the glucose”.
02:07 Wide
– researcher talking to Diabetes patient
c.u
– patient
Wide
– researcher talking to Diabetes patient
Wide
– exterior Bristol University Dorothy Hodgkin Building
c.u.
building sign
Wide
– Dr Colin Dayan walking down stairs
Guide Voice: This provides Diabetes patients
with regular updates of their blood sugar readings as opposed to
the infrequent “finger stick” tests traditionally used
by diabetics.
Non-invasive means of delivering drugs and monitoring patients
are particularly interesting to Diabetes researchers. At the
neighbouring University of Bristol scientists are working to
develop a vaccine against the Type 1 form of the disease.
02:31 SOT: Colin Dayan, Consultant Senior Lecturer in
Medicine, Endocrine Immunology Group, University of
Bristol– “ There’s still a lot of
people out there with type-1 diabetes, they have it all their life,
they’re treated with insulin and they develop problems
because the insulin treatment is good enough to keep them alive but
not good enough to prevent problems”.
02:44 Wide
– researcher at aeration cupboard
c.u.
researcher and samples
c.u.
pipette picking up sample
Placing
samples in ampoule
c.u.
of above
Wide
– Dr Dayan talking to diabetes patient
Reverse
of above
Wide
– Dr Dayan, patient and researcher
Wide
– Dr Dayan at spectroscope
c.u.
scope screen
c.u.
Dr Dayan
c.u.
screen
Tilt
down from Dr Dayan to keyboard
c.u.
screen
Guide Voice: In type one diabetes the patients
own immune system is destroying the insulin producing cells –
so researchers are looking for a means of disabling the immune
systems response to the insulin cells without completely disabling
the immune system. Potential type 1 Diabetes sufferers can be
identified up to 10 years in advance, giving a window of
opportunity for intervention – if a successful treatment can
be found.
Working with colleagues at King’s College, London,
researchers at Bristol are about to start clinical trials of a
vaccine that includes peptides, or protein fragments, identical to
proteins contained in the islet cells. These stimulate the
production of protective immune cells that overwhelm the aggressive
immune cells causing type 1 Diabetes, keeping them in check.
It’s early days yet, but the means of delivery for this
treatment could be an important aspect of the study.
03:37 SOT: Dr. Dayan –
“There are a lot of cells just under the skin which are
part of the immune system and if we can deliver something to those
cells in a way that is not irritant it is likely that we will get
protective immune responses rather than aggressive immune
responses, this is very important because what we don’t want
if you like in one sense is a vaccine, what we don’t want is
to turn on the immune system and in recent years it has become
clear that one of the things that aggravates the immune system is
damage. So damage to the skin, the release of certainly the
presence of bacteria aggravates the immune system and they make it
respond in a way that is destructive”.
04:19 Wide
– researcher at desk
c.u.
piece of pig’s ear being placed in equipment
Guide Voice: Which brings us back to Professor
Guy’s work on transdermal delivery.
04:24 SOT: Prof. Guy - “There’s
a lot of work going on at the present time to develop minimally
invasive technologies and all of these technologies have one thing
in common they’re making very small holes or perforations in
the skin through which you can deliver not only the small molecules
like the ones that are contained in patches today but also
macromolecules, big molecules, like proteins, bits of gene, dna,
like vaccines and the idea there is that technology is used to
provoke these small imperfections in the skin through which a drug
can be delivered transiently and then the skin will effectively
re-seal itself and heal itself”
05:08 Wide
– researcher in lab
c.u
– researcher’s hands and apparatus
Guide Voice: It seems our skin has more to do
than simply keep our insides in – it could be the key to
delivering a better healthcare future.
05.18
END
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