Research Projects

PRISMA. Micro-mechanical pump for next generation insulin delivery systems

Start Date:     

01/07/2022

End Date:    

30/06/2025

Financing entity:  

Comisión europea. Programa HORIZON

Reference:    

HORIZON-EIC-2021-TRANSITIONOPEN-01 Ref.  101057436

ai2 participants:       

About the project

PRISMA is a revolutionary thin-film micropump realized with novel ceria-based oxides actuating materials in the frame of the FET-OPEN BioWings project, which can be used as an innovative pumping system in wearable insulin delivery devices for the treatment of diabetes.

The integration of the PRISMA micropump in insulin patch pumps addresses the 3 most important pain points that still keep the vast majority of diabetic patients away from this life-saving treatment:

  • Size, which is more than two orders of magnitude smaller than state of the art.
  • Higher drug delivery accuracy within the ?5% range ensures the highest therapeutic efficacy.
  • Drastic reduction in energy consumption.

Besides the short-term vision to realise extremely compact and accurate patch pumps, the long term goal is to allow the realisation of multi-drug delivery systems, making real the much-lauded multi-hormone treatment.

The main objective of this project is to validate the pump and its manufacturing process in a real operating environment, proving to system integrators that all specifications are consistently met to pave the way for the post-project system integration and clinical validation.

This will pave the way to the launch of a startup company that will take care of the final steps of the development roadmap and will establish long-term cooperation agreements with prominent medical device manufacturers for the integration of PRISMA in next-generation single and multi-hormone smart patches.