The Near-Term Approach to the Artificial Pancreas

The components to create an artificial pancreas for the treatment of diabetes exist today. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the leading charitable funder of diabetes research, has initiated an effort to coordinate industry, clinicians, academics and the FDA to hasten the development of a commercial artificial pancreas. The seminar will outline the challenges of treating diabetes and the promising improvements an artificial pancreas could bring. The components for creating the artificial pancreas – the insulin(s), the insulin pump, and the continuous glucose monitor – will be reviewed with particular emphasis on their strengths and limitations. The approaches to the development of the last component – the controller – will be described, and the some early clinical studies of the control algorithms will be reviewed.

Presenter(s)

Geoffrey McGarraugh is the Directory of Chemistry at Abbot Diabetes Care which acquired TheraSense Inc where he led development of the FreeStyle (tm) Blood Glucose Monitor and the Navigator (tm) Continuos Glucose Monitoring system. He has worked on many seminal glucose monitoring projects from feasibility to commercialization. He has twenty-nine US and international patents in the field of glucose monitoring. He previously worked at LifeScan, A Johnson & Johnson Company where he co-invented the One Touch (tm) Blood Glucose Monitor, the first glucose monitor that eliminated user technique. He has an M.S. in Chemistry from University of California, Santa Cruz and a B.S. from University of California, Los Angeles.