Modelling endogenous insulin concentration in type 2 diabetes during closed-loop insulin delivery

BACKGROUND: Closed-loop insulin delivery is an emerging treatment for type 1 diabetes (T1D) evaluated clinically and using computer simulations during pre-clinical testing. Efforts to make closed-loop systems available to people with type 2 diabetes (T2D) calls for the development of a new type of simulators to accommodate differences between T1D and T2D. Presented here is the development of a model of posthepatic endogenous insulin concentration, a component omitted in T1D simulators but key for simulating T2D physiology. METHODS: We evaluated six competing models to describe the time course of endogenous insulin concentration as a function of the plasma glucose concentration and time. The models were fitted to data collected in insulin-naive subjects with T2D who underwent two 24-h visits and were treated, in a random order, by either closed-loop insulin delivery or glucose-lowering oral agents. The model parameters were estimated using a Bayesian approach, as implemented in the WinBUGS software. Model selection criteria were used to identify the best model describing our clinical data. RESULTS: The selected model successfully described endogenous insulin concentration over 24 h in both study periods and provided plausible parameter estimates. Model-derived results were in concordance with a clinical finding which revealed increased posthepatic endogenous insulin concentration during the control study period (P < 0.05). The modelling results indicated that the excess amount of insulin can be attributed to the glucose-independent effect as the glucose-dependent effect was similar between visits (P > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: A model to describe endogenous insulin concentration in T2D including components of posthepatic glucose-dependent and glucose-independent insulin secretion was identified and validated. The model is suitable to be incorporated in a simulation environment for evaluating closed-loop insulin delivery in T2D. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12938-015-0009-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.