The researchers, who describe the insulin delivery approach in Science Translational Medicine, say the system was inspired by the “smart home” concept, which involves lighting, heating, and electronic devices that communicate with one another and can all be controlled remotely with phone or computer apps. They say the remote-controlled cells could “pave the way for a new era of personalized, digitalized, and globalized precision medicine.”

Haifeng Ye, a senior author of the paper and a professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai, says his goal is a “fully automatic blood glucose monitor and diabetes therapy system” that could continuously monitor diabetes 24 hours a day and share the data via smartphones.

In type 1 diabetes, the pancreas doesn’t produce enough insulin, a hormone necessary to convert sugar, or glucose, into energy. Currently people with type 1 diabetes need to take several insulin injections every day or wear an insulin pump that delivers the hormone through a plastic tube inserted into the skin. About 1.25 million children and adults in the U.S. have type 1 diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association.

It’s still early days for optogenetics. Two of the main challenges are which type of light frequency to use and how to beam this light at the right intensity to stimulate cells.

In people, similar results might be achieved with an LED bracelet instead of implanted discs in the skin, says Mark Gomelsky, a molecular biologist at the University of Wyoming who reviewed Ye’s paper and authored an article about it. The engineered cells would still need to be injected separately, and it’s not clear how often that would be required in people.

Gomelsky says the Chinese team’s technique may not be the best approach to treating type 1 diabetes, especially since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year approved the first fully automated insulin pump. But he says remote-controlled cells engineered to produce genetically encoded drugs could be used to treat other diseases.

Another possible problem with a phone-controlled therapy is security. Ye acknowledged that the app may be vulnerable to hacking but says software engineers could easily solve that by installing an encryption key.