“Diabetes,” says the American Diabetes Association, “is a chronic disease that has no cure.” There are, of course, batteries of scientists and researchers working to solve the diabetes riddle. So a cure, perhaps, is on the way. Someday.

But that’s too long for Todd Zion to wait.

Zion, who turned 28 in November, graduated from Cornell with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1997 and eventually moved on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is pursuing a doctorate in the same field. In May, his technology, known as SmartCells, won the $30,000 grand prize in a renowned MIT entrepreneurship competition that has recognized companies since acquired by giants such as Motorola, Cisco, and Microsoft. It bested 117 other entrants; the two runners-up were involved in three-dimensional imaging and neurology.

SmartCells’ breakthrough, according to the technical literature, is “a new kind of biodegradable polymer to produce stimuli-responsive nanoparticles for controlled drug delivery.” For many of those 11.1 million Americans whose daily lives are filled with pinpricks and syringes, though, SmartCells’ breakthrough is freedom.

“What we’re hoping to do is bridge the gap between traditional therapy and a cure,” says Zion, who has spent the past four years working on the drug in MIT’s Nanostructure Materials Research Laboratory.

If it pans out, SmartCells will mean that diabetics can stop endlessly checking and re-checking their glucose levels, injecting more insulin as needed, because the drug—a nanoengineered wonder—will handle that chore. Though the process is proprietary, here’s what Zion can say about it: When glucose rises in the bloodstream, it will eat away at SmartCells’ structure. As the SmartCells protein matrix breaks down, insulin is released. The more glucose that is present, the faster the matrix will erode.

The result is that SmartCells can act as would a normally functioning pancreas, where insulin is supposed to be made. An injection a day is all Zion envisions diabetics will need. No blood testing. No multiple shots.

“The way diabetics do this now is they have to time their dose and calculate their dose generally within a half hour of eating their meal,” Zion says. “It’s a way of trying to mimic what the pancreas does, but it’s completely dependent on the patient. They become, essentially, the artificial pancreas in some ways. They administer their own dosage and do their own dosage calculations.”

That’s the part of the disease that’s an inconvenience. But the disease itself is more than a nuisance. It is the nation’s sixth largest cause of death, killing nearly half a million people in the United States every year. The complications arising from diabetes are what prove deadly, as diabetics are more susceptible than non-diabetics to heart and kidney disease, stroke, and high blood pressure. Diabetics’ problems arise because their bodies have trouble completing one of nature’s most basic tasks: turning food into energy. Typically, most food is converted into glucose, or sugar, which enters the bloodstream and provides fuel to cells to do their work. But the glucose doesn’t just magically enter those cells. It takes a key—insulin—to unlock them so the glucose can enter.

In non-diabetics, the pancreas continuously monitors glucose levels and generates just enough insulin to unlock those cells. “It’s an incredible mechanism for controlling blood glucose within a very narrow range,” Zion says.

Diabetics don’t have that mechanism. In some cases, the pancreas doesn’t produce any insulin at all. About 5 to 10 percent of diabetics are afflicted with this form of the disease, known as Type 1 diabetes. The only treatment is insulin injections. Another form of diabetes, known as Type 2, affects nearly all other diabetics. The body may produce insulin, but not enough. Or the body may simply use the insulin improperly when it is produced. In some cases, Type 2 diabetics require insulin injections, too.

But even though advances have been made in insulin, injections are still not an ideal method of regulating glucose. “Everything you associate with diabetes—nerve damage, kidney damage, blindness, eventual amputations—is primarily a result of not being able to control blood glucose effectively with current treatments,” Zion says. “All of this points to the need to provide insulin in a more physiological fashion.”

Solving these issues is a question of biochemistry, in which Zion was interested but had no formal background. At MIT, where he went after working on polymer development at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, his lab initially focused on designing inorganic nanoparticles. One early project, for example, involved designing metal oxides to sense the presence of toxic gases. Because the tiny particles had such a great surface area when added together, the sensors were generally much more sensitive than mechanical tools. But a whole new field of inquiry opened up when nanotechnology met the biotech front head on a couple of years ago, Zion says. “We wanted to see if we could move specifically into the field of biotechnology.”

These days, it seems, nano- is becoming as common a prefix as dot-com was a suffix in the 1990s. Small has become very, very big. Cornell’s new, $62.5 million Duffield Hall will be one of the most sophisticated facilities in the country for nanotechnology research. President Bush’s 2004 budget provides $847 million for the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a 9.5 percent increase over 2003. And states such as Texas and New York are hard at work outspending each other in nanotechnology investments.

And when it comes to touting the wonders that nano-anything can bring, new drugs are among the first things mentioned. Plenty of researchers are working on projects such as drugs that target cancerous cells and bombard them with chemotherapy agents. Zion and his partners were eager to try a different approach to nano pharmaceuticals. “Nanoparticles are definitely good for all sorts of alternative drug delivery applications or enhanced drug delivery applications,” Zion says. “Could we functionalize them in a way that made them perform not just in a timed-release manner or a targeted approach, but could we make them act in response to a stimuli in the body? That’s essentially where I came on board.”

Diabetes wasn’t a random choice. Zion had a personal reason for targeting the disease. His cousin is a Type 1 diabetic. And his father-in-law is a Type 2. Those people weren’t the sole reasons why he was interested in tackling the problem. But he knew how tricky it would be to solve the complex relationship between glucose and insulin. And challenge fuels him.

That Zion is on the cusp of a serious biochemical achievement comes as no surprise to Cornell’s Assoc. Prof. T. Michael Duncan, associate director of what was called the School of Chemical Engineering, when SmartCells’ inventor earned his undergraduate degree. For starters, the fields that Zion is tapping—pharmaceuticals, biochemistry, nanotechnology—“all of these are within chemical engineering,” Duncan says. “You can move within any of these fields. Todd is a perfect example of that.”

The basic skills Zion learned, Duncan says, “allowed him to change his focus within chemical engineering because it’s the same background in all these things.” And Zion isn’t alone in his successes. “This department has had a long standing history of leaders in that area,” Duncan adds, citing among other examples Robert Langer ’70, the 2002 winner of the prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering, who is credited with developing biocompatible polymer technologies that control the release of medicine over time, and Ann Lee ’83, who is executive director of bioprocess research and development at Merck Research Laboratories.

And that’s a tradition likely to continue: In the years since Zion’s graduation, the College of Engineering has strengthened its emphasis on bioengineering, changing the name of the department to School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering to underscore the opportunities for research discoveries at the interface of chemical engineering and biology and creating a separate interdisciplinary program in biomedical engineering.

Duncan, who taught Zion in a physical chemistry class, not only remembered him fondly but wrote a glowing letter of recommendation to enter gra-duate school. “Unlike others who have occupied the top position in this class, Todd always seemed easy going—never intense,” he wrote at the time. Elaborating the point recently, Duncan recalls that the big news that Zion recently shared with his former mentor was not about the $30,000 prize but the birth of his son.

The MIT competition required a complete business plan, which was judged by a panel of experienced entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and legal professionals. David Stone, managing director at Cambridge venture capital firm Flagship Venture and a specialist in life sciences investments, was a member of the panel. “One of the things that impressed the judges is that there is a very large market for the treatment of diabetes,” says Stone, who has remained in contact with Zion since the competition. And business potential, not just cool technology, is what venture capitalists are interested in—and what the competition is all about.

Zion and the SmartCells team hope to assemble $2.5 million from venture capitalists over the next 12 to 18 months to bring the product through the testing cycle. It has already begun an early round of experiments with lab rats. “Although the results are preliminary, we’ve at least been able to show we can lower the blood glucose levels from hyperglycemic conditions to more normal conditions for a day and a half,” Zion says.

But while the science may be what keeps Zion in the lab for 10 hours a day—it used to be more, he says, but becoming a father changed that—SmartCells’ success will depend on business savvy as well. Zion rattles off phrases like “angel investor” and “equity dilution” without pause. I’ve learned a great deal,” he says. “I’ve had to deal with people on a much more businesslike manner.”

Zion’s interest in business is not unique among members of his graduating class. “When you look at the types of jobs that our chemical engineering class took up on graduating—and the economy was very good in ’97—management consulting was a big draw,” he says. “Mainly because the strong tech background, combined with these practically oriented classes we took, is well suited to that type of role.”

And near Boston, cradle to all kinds of biotech startups, Zion has found no shortage of experienced people willing to latch onto a good idea and show him the ropes. “There’s a tremendous number of people in the entrepreneurial community just in the Boston area alone who are so willing to help out just on this kind of idea—and have lent a significant amount of advice,” Zion says.

One of those is Mort Rosenthal, senior vice president at Lesley University, a liberal arts college in Cambridge, outside Boston. Rosenthal, a former software entrepreneur who sits on SmartCells’ board, was initially attracted to Zion’s idea because his 11-year-old son has Type 1 diabetes.

“He presents well, he talks well, he understands business and management,” Rosenthal says of Zion. And despite all that, he’s not too full of himself. “He doesn’t have an unreasonable understanding of his own capabilities. He’s probably less self-serving than he should be.”

As an investment, SmartCells won’t prove worthless if a cure for diabetes does come along, Rosenthal said. The underlying science behind it can have other applications. And in the meantime, the technology can help diabetics—such as his son. “I’d rather he be cured, but second choice is to have the treatment be less invasive.” Despite SmartCells’ success in the competition, winning the entrepreneurship prize didn’t convince Zion he’d become an overnight business expert. “I am actively looking for a CEO right now with some gray hairs, some experience taking a drug to market,” he says. “And that person will be much more able to run the company while I focus on the things that I do best.”