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

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This is a response to this article at diabetesmine.com which talks about your invention for a non-invasive glucose monitor that would take readings through the skin on your ear.

Hi Larry, my company can help move this forward through the clinical trial process with much of what you need at the lowest total cost for your next step. Gluconix for clinical trials.

The path isn’t impossible but the incumbents didn’t make it easy (on purpose I’m afraid). The safety issue must be managed as part of a plan that moves you toward commercialization but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t get this in the field to demonstrate that it works (or maybe not). You can go to our website to send me a message.

We’ve also figured out how to win $1.5M in competitive grants to date helping to support randomized, controlled clinical trials of our ADMS as we move toward commercialization so that might come in handy, too.

My message to Larry was also posted as a comment to the article.