Some healthy reading over at Journal of Diabetes, Science and Technology that opens for discussion one man made barrier to accomplishing not only the artificial pancreas but also many of the step wise advancements that might be discovered along the way. This article begs an answer from JDRF as to how they plan to clear these roadblocks. Hopefully they won’t be spending more millions buying up patent licenses or implementing inferior workarounds. Otherwise their first millions may be a waste of money and could easily require a lot more than what is on the table at present. After all, if JDRF is ready with the cash what incentive is there for the for profit entities (assuming there will be more partnerships like this in the future) to fork over the dough?

From the article, this diagram below shows just how many patents are in play around a closed loop artificial pancreas.

Figure 2. Number of U.S. Patents filed per year related to closed-loop glucose control systems obtained by searching for the terms “closed loop”, “glucose control,” “artificial pancreas,” and “diabetes” combined with the most relevant IPC classes (A61M, A61B, and G01N). Similar terms were considered (e.g., “close” instead of “closed”, or “analyte” instead of “glucose”).

Download the full article from the Journal of Diabetes, Science and Technology website here

The following is my best attempt at transcribing from memory a conversation I had earlier today with my 9yr old daughter; my inspiration for improving the tools needed by patients, caregivers and their medical teams for keeping her healthy while we race for a cure to type 1 diabetes:

Dad: “Have you ever heard of Microsoft?”

Daughter: “Sure. They built our computer.”

Dad: “Do you know who Google is?”

Daughter: “Yeah. They invented the Internet.”

Dad: “Both Microsoft and Google are working to accelerate research towards a cure for diabetes.”

Daughter: “That’s awesome, Dad.”

Dad: “Instead of using what Microsoft and Google already put together, ‘ABCD’ decided to pay a small company to build the same thing. What do think about that?”

Daughter: “Why don’t they just work with Microsoft and Google? Oh, they probably know the people that work for that company. That money should be used to help find the cure, Dad.”

It’s a sad day when your 9 yr old daughter knows when things aren’t right and yet the people you are counting on to make every dollar count for accelerating a cure to your daughter’s disease don’t see it. Even if there is a good reason to bypass existing and more powerful alternatives, those decisions aren’t being made in the open and the people donating the money don’t have the slightest access as to why.

How about transparency in the world of non-profits or do we just not expect the same level of fiduciary responsibility that Obama is asking for from his administration?

Given the state of free and existing communities like Ning (as well as Facebook, MySpace, etc…) and patient registries like TrialX (a description of their patient registry and trial matching service with Microsoft & Google) there had better be a damn good reason why people we entrust with our money (non-profits and the government) spend our money developing web-based services from scratch vs. taking advantage of commercially available and highly cost effective alternatives.

It’s always nicer when someone else is talking about the virtues of your product.  Being compared to the simplicity of Google’s gmail and online applications was especially sweet.  Thanks David!

“The Simple GlucoMON”

“It works in a similar way to Google’s Gmail and Google Docs that I completely rely on nowadays. GlucoMON® even does Google one better. To use it you don’t need an Internet connection. Or even a computer. Or a phone line. And soon you won’t even need electricity for it.”

“… especially attractive to parents who have children with diabetes in school.”

“I have seen and used lots of different log sheets and in fact link some of them on my website. But none of them hold a candle to the GlucoMON’s report, which is not only automatic but also logs blood glucose results in hourly time-slots, highlights highs and lows, and makes trend analysis simple.”

— David Mendosa, a writer on the web

Read David’s complete review of the GlucoMON-RT commercial offer at Healthcentral.com