Rekindling Hope

Insulin Nation features a story on the bionic pancreas Hope is a strange thing for someone who has lived with diabetes for as long as I have. It’s there. Deep inside me somewhere. But it’s dormant; smothered to sleep by decades of failed promises and premature excitement (usually involving cured mice). Ed Damiano showed me something pretty amazing at the CWD Focus on Technology conference recently, and I felt a glimmer. It was like he had a bellows and was delicately nursing to life the embers of hope in me. The Bionic Pancreas - the tagline on the website is “using mathematics to treat diabetes …five minutes at a time.” This bionic pancreas is not a cure. It is exactly what it sounds like. A bionic pancreas. Which is kind of what we have now, but with a couple of weak links. We are one weak link, and our crippled glucagon response is the other (that last one is complicated, and beyond the scope of this post). Ed and his team have created a system that uses existing technology (a Dexcom G4, an iPhone, and two Tandem tSlim pumps) to make a new decision about insulin and glucose dosing every five minutes. I won’t get into the studies and details here, it’s all on their website. But I will say that they are on-track (with an aggressive trial schedule) for commercialization in 2017. The online publication, Insulin Nation, pictured above, has a lot of information in their story, and I encourage you to check it out. Ed has also been featu...
Source: Scott's Diabetes Blog - Category: Diabetes Authors: Tags: Blog Posts CWD Artificial Pancreas Bionic Pancreas Ed Damiano Focus on Technology Hope Sean Oser Source Type: blogs