November is Diabetes Awareness Month, and Local 4 has news of progress on what is being called the bionic pancreas.
A recently published paper in the New England Journal of Medicine has brought it closer to FDA approval.
Insulin pumps that give routine insulin infusions without repeated needle sticks have been around for years, and glucose monitors also aren’t new.
But, when you combine them with some very fancy software in the bionic pancreas, you get very close to what a person’s real pancreas does to control blood sugar naturally.
“This pump was smarter than us, and it knew what to do, so let it do it,” said nurse practitioner Davida Kruger at Henry Ford Health.
Kruger is one of the contributors to a recently published paper on the bionic pancreas. In fact, Henry Ford Health enrolled the largest number of patients testing the new device.
The system works when a glucose monitor checks the person’s sugar, and that’s wirelessly relayed to the bionic pancreas depending on the level of the sugar, how fast it’s changing, and whether the person has eaten the software tells the bionic pancreas pump to give a dose of insulin to lower the sugar.
Or it can also give a dose of a medicine called glucagon to raise the sugar, ultimately keeping the glucose in a near-normal range with very little input from the patient.
“Over time, and it doesn’t take long, within a week or so, that pump gets to know how you eat, how you respond to what you eat, and how much insulin to give you, and that’s all the patient has to do,” Kruger said.
“It knew enough that when blood sugars started trending down to lower or turn off the insulin, so the patients were still protected, and we still saw a benefit. I think we’re pretty close to it becoming a reality. The study we just finished was an FDA-mandated study.”
But most important was the patient’s response.
“In some instances, I actually had to wrestle the pump out of their hands because they had to give them back to me and say you’ll have to wait till it comes to the market,” Kruger said.
The bionic pancreas isn’t the only product of its kind. In fact, within the world of diabetes care, there are already less advanced setups known as closed-loop systems where glucose levels and insulin delivery are being done with less and less burden on patients.