I was invited to a presentation at UCSB hosted by the JDRF, Sansum Diabetes Research Center of Santa Barbara and UCSB . They are in a joint venture to create a closed loop system using a Insulin pump and CGM.called “The JDRF Artificial Pancreas Project”. They have assembled quite a talented group including, Dr. Lois Jovanovic M.D ,FACE http://www.sansum.org/scientific_physic.php, Dale E Seaborg Ph.D. Chemical Engineer, Dr. Eyal Dassau, Ph.D.resaearch Engineer, and others. I believe the spokesperson from JDRF said they granted 500,000 + Dollars to this team. The idea is to monitor subjects in steady state, following meal challenges, and in various states of stress to simulate real life variations. The data are then used to fit a model that can link changes in glucose to recommended changes in glucose infusion. The goal of this research is to develop a portable perhaps instrument that would calculate and deliver insulin based on continuous feedback of moment-to-moment glucose concentrations. It was great to see that they modified the ADA pyramid of diet ,medication and exercise to a square that includes stress as a factor in BS control. The talk was very infomative. The goal is to have a unit that requires only one infusion and that can learn patterns and adjust for them. One of the problems seems to be that the CGMs are only accurate in a window between 69 and 200, but they believe that manufacturers will improve this. Another obstacle has been with the FDA approval, so the people in the study are outside of the USA, but they say the FDA is coming around. All in all sounds good, but of course projected date is about 5 years. Any way thought i would share this
Very happy to hear the projected release is only five years away, but, given the reliability of current cgms, (ours is not accurate at night if she is sleeping or lying on the sensor – and of course at night you may be lying on the sensor – and the fact that the blood sugars do not reliably match fingersticks all the time, i.e. fingerstick 34 and Dex 126 flat), wouldn’t cgms have to be FAR FAR more accurate in order for us to trust the Artificial Pancreas? I would love for thsi to be available before she is 18 so she does not have the onerous task of monitoring her night time blood sugar levels. I also know there is no way she can monitor them as we do and function at school or at a job. So praying hard that all glitches will be taken care of and AP, or some version of it, can be relieased in five years time. Thanks for the update.
Right on Danny. Talking to someone who does research, yhey said 5 years is the magic number for finding ,10 years is too long sponsers are lkess likly to give money for something so far off and 2 years ,people would expect results too soon. 5 just right.
Great to hear. Thanks for sharing this update.