Living in the United States, we are often stuck in a bubble of US-centric news. This is true for diabetes as much as any other topic. But as World Diabetes Day attests to, diabetes is hardly just an American thing. In reality, there’s much more going on in the global diabetes research arena than you might think (since our media announcements are pretty much limited to, err, Boston, Miami and the Bay Area). So today,…
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In honor of both National Diabetes Month and the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, I wanted to share with you the story of a man whom we all owe a debt of gratitude: Dr. Frederick Banting.
Some of you may know this, but World Diabetes Day was chosen to be on November 14 because it is Dr. Banting’s birthday. He was born on November 14, 1891, which meant this year he would have been 118 years old.…
A gentleman cornered me at the Diabetes Technology Society meeting earlier this month, and said he wanted to talk non-invasive glucose monitoring. How could I resist?
He said his name was Avner Gal, from Israel. He pulled out a chunky little MP3-looking device, and plugged in a cord with a small clamp on the end. Then he hooked the clamp to his earlobe, and pressed a button. We both watched the progress bar move slowly…
Al Mann, CEO of MannKind Corp., is something of a legend in his own time. He not only founded MiniMed, acquired by Medtronic, but also four other successful medical companies. He’s a billionaire, with his own Biomedical Engineering Institute at the University of Southern California (USC), so we can assume that he’s not just championing the new inhalable insulin product Technosphere (brand name Afresa) as some kind of pipe dream or get-rich-quick scheme.
The guy…
The Diabetes Technology Society held its annual meeting last Thursday through Saturday, which always takes place just about a mile and a half from my house. But guess what? This was the very first year that I found myself on the inside of this exclusive event, participating in a panel (the very last panel of the 3-day event) on “technologies to drive patient adherence.”
The term “adherence” made me bristle, too, because it sounds like…