San Francisco and Berkeley, CA, February 16, 2026 – A wearable pancreas implant that can be inserted into a diabetic’s arm to control insulin levels without requiring a lifelong regimen of immunosuppressant therapy is one step closer to becoming reality. Surprisingly, the breakthrough didn’t come from bioengineers, but rather, from mathematicians.
A team of mathematicians led by Professor Sunčica Čanić at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a novel multiscale math model that enables bioengineers to ‘see’ for the first time what’s happening inside an implantable bioartificial pancreas (iBAP).
The breakthrough — recently featured in SIAM News, a publication of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) – uses state-of-the-art mathematical and computational methods to accurately simulate blood flow and oxygen transport in a small-scale implant.
The work was done in partnership with the Biodesign Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, under the leadership of Director Shuvo Roy and is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.
The model is significant because it gives bioengineers the information they need to optimize the flow of oxygen and nutrients to healthy implanted cells to prevent hypoxia (cell death), a major challenge facing the advancement of bioartificial organ design.
“Our
model helps bioengineers understand how the blood is flowing, where the oxygen
is concentrated, and what the nutrient supply looks like so they can tweak
their designs to provide optimal flow,” said Čanić, whose team includes Yifan
Wang, Assistant Professor
at Texas Tech University and Martina Bukač, Associate Professor at Notre Dame
University.
“Up until now,
scientists lacked the mathematical tools and scientific computation needed to
understand how these porous, flexible materials interact with a patient’s blood
inside bioartificial implants,” said
Čanić. She explained that
the model reveals details that can’t be accessed through measurements or
experiments alone, such as oxygen and insulin concentrations at every point –
rather than in total – inside the pancreas. The
Biodesign Lab’s most recent bioartificial pancreas design — currently being
tested in animals — is a small device measuring roughly two-and-a-half by four inches
that can be inserted into a forearm or shoulder with tubing to connect to an
artery for blood intake and a vein for insulin output. Transplanted healthy
pancreatic cells are housed in a sponge-like substance encased by a thin
membrane and vertically drilled channels are used to deliver necessary oxygen
and nutrients to the transplanted cells via blood. Once insulin-rich blood is
produced, it is collected and distributed back out through the patient’s vein. Applying
their mathematical model, Čanić’s team conducted computational simulations to
compare three different channel designs to support blood flow through the
device: vertically drilled, branching and hexagonal. Their results showed that
in the conventional vertical design, only about 13% of the transplanted cells
receive enough oxygen to avoid hypoxia. In contrast, the branching design
increased that percentage to nearly 52%, while the hexagonal design performed
best, with more than 97% of the transplanted cells receiving oxygen
concentrations above the threshold needed to prevent cell death. Based
on the findings, the Biodesign Lab team was able to refine their device to increase
oxygen supply and is expected to develop and test a prototype using the hexagonal
channel design in pig models next year. The
breakthrough model is an important step forward in bioartificial organ design,
said Čanić, because it is the first mathematical theory to capture what is
called fluid-poroelastic structure interaction — the ‘dance’ between a
free-flowing fluid like blood and the deforming of a sponge-like solid as it
contracts and regains its shape. Not only is it removing a limitation in the
field, but it is also bringing Dr. Roy’s team one step closer to moving from
animal to human studies. “Right
now, their design is functioning, but they needed to find a way to measure and
improve the flow of oxygen and nutrients in their scaffold in order to extend
transplanted cell life,” she said. “By helping them to better understand how
bioartificial organs carry oxygen and nutrients to cells, we’re making it
possible to vastly improve oxygen and nutrient delivery, thereby prolonging the
longevity of the implant.” This model provides
a powerful new computer tool that can guide the future design of bioartificial
organs, Čanić
explained. By combining
advanced simulations with artificial intelligence (AI), the tool can quickly predict
oxygen levels at the scale of individual cells – a task that previously
required time-consuming and computationally expensive methods. "We can
now combine classical mathematical approaches with AI to rapidly predict oxygen
concentrations for any new scaffold at the push of a button,” said Čanić.
"This hybrid, AI-enhanced approach enables us to obtain detailed oxygen
distribution information in real-life scaffolds far more quickly and
efficiently than with traditional computational methods alone." About Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (www.siam.org)
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
(SIAM), headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an international
society of 14,000 individual, academic, and corporate members from 85
countries. SIAM fosters the development of applied mathematics and
computational methodologies needed in various application areas. Through
publications, conferences, and communities like student chapters, geographic
sections, and activity groups, SIAM builds cooperation between mathematics and
the worlds of science and technology to solve real-world problems. Learn more
at siam.org.