Hanlu Doyle

Diabetes is a condition in which the body produces too little or no insulin. Diabetics thus depend on an external supply of this hormone via injection or pump. Researchers led by Martin Fussenegger from the biosystems science and engineering department at ETH Zurich in Basel, Switzerland want to make the lives of people with diabetes easier and are looking for solutions to produce and administer insulin directly in the body. One such solution the scientists are pursuing is enclosing insulin-producing designer cells in capsules that can be implanted in the body. To be able to control from the outside when and how much insulin the cells release into the blood, researchers have studied and applied different triggers in recent years: light, temperature, and electric fields. Fussenegger and his colleagues have now developed another, novel stimulation method: they use music to trigger the cells to release insulin within minutes. This works especially well with “We Will Rock You,” a global hit by British rock band, Queen. To make the insulin-producing cells receptive to sound waves, the researchers used a protein from the bacterium E. coli. Such proteins respond to mechanical stimuli and are common in animals and bacteria. The protein is located in the membrane of the bacterium and regulates the influx of calcium ions into the cell interior. The researchers have incorporated the blueprint of this bacterial ion channel into human insulin-producing cells. This lets these cells create the ion channel themselves and embed it in their membrane.

this is actually addressed in the article!

"To test the system as a whole, the researchers implanted the insulin-producing cells into mice and placed the animals so that their bellies were directly on the loudspeaker. This was the only way the researchers could observe an insulin response. If, however, the animals were able to move freely in a “mouse disco,” the music failed to trigger insulin release.

"Our designer cells release insulin only when the sound source with the right sound is played directly on the skin above the implant,” Fussenegger explains. The release of the hormone was not triggered by ambient noise such as aircraft noise, lawnmowers, fire brigade sirens, or conversations."

so they only activate when you press a speaker directly to your skin above the implant

also worth noting: