Wearable sensors that use microneedles to painlessly take samples at skin level could help personalize health care and enable precision drug dosing in real time, but many have been limited by weak signals and damage caused by friction in tissue.

A UCLA-led team developed a microneedle platform that operated continuously for six days in rats while improving signal quality and resistance to abrasion.

In preclinical studies, the technology not only tracked drug levels but also revealed impaired kidney and liver function based on how quickly drugs cleared from the animals’ systems — including identifying early kidney injury before conventional blood tests indicated a problem.

In patients developing end-stage liver disease, the damage has become too severe for the liver’s normally extraordinary regenerative capacity to repair or compensate for it. Once this “point of no return” has been reached, the only option is an organ transplant. To help bridge the time a transplant becomes available, a Wyss-Boston University-MIT team has innovated BOOST, a novel strategy that combines tissue engineering and synthetic biology to allow on-demand healthy liver growth of genetically engineered tissue constructs upon their implantation. This advanced is published in Science Advances.