Homemade pancreas

Advanced families are starting to use homemade devices in the fight against diabetes

Wall Street Journal, Kate Linebaugh
Tech-Savvy Families Use Home-Built Diabetes DeviceTranslation: @bugakov, Geektimes

Medical companies are working on creating an artificial pancreas. But for many families, the wait has become too long.

Third-grader Andrew Calabrese does not part with his backpack anywhere when he is at a school located in the San Diego area. The backpack is filled not only with textbooks – it also contains his artificial pancreas.

The device, which has long been regarded as the Holy Grail of type I diabetes treatment technologies, was not assembled by an eminent medical company. It was not approved by state regulators. It was assembled by Andrew's father.

Jason Calabrese, a programmer by profession, followed the instructions found online – according to them, he redesigned the insulin pump to automatically inject his son with the right dose of hormone in response to fluctuations in blood sugar levels. With the approval of the family doctor, Andrew now carries a homemade device to school.

The Calabrese family is not alone: more than 50 people have soldered, assembled and programmed similar devices for themselves or for their children. Systems (known as "feedback systems", closed-loop systems) – have been studied for decades, but advances in technologies for monitoring sugar levels in real time have made them possible in practice.

The FDA has made it a priority to review and approve such devices and several companies are already working on them. But this process can take years, and technically advanced families have begun to take matters into their own hands.

At the very beginning, Jason was very worried about the safety of his product. He built it for 2 months and spent another weeks debugging it. At first, he only used it on weekends and at night. When he was convinced of its reliability, he decided that it would be irresponsible not to use it on his 9-year-old son to the fullest.

"Diabetes is dangerous in itself. Insulin is dangerous. I believe that what we are doing improves his quality of life and reduces the risk," said the 41-year-old father.

The FDA has the right to regulate the activities of medical companies and doctors. But as long as people conjure up insulin pumps themselves and do not sell/distribute them, the federal agency is tied up.

More than a million Americans live with type I diabetes, an autoimmune disease in which the pancreas stops producing insulin, a hormone needed to convert sugar into energy. An increase in blood sugar levels threatens serious long–term consequences - from kidney failure to coma. The hope for an artificial pancreas is that the algorithm will be able to correctly dose insulin according to the indications of a subcutaneous sensor that measures sugar levels.

The amateur project used by the Calabrese family, OpenAPS (Open Artificial Pancreas System), was started by Dana Lewis, 27, living in Seattle. Dana, who suffers from type I diabetes, started using the system in December 2014 as an experiment on herself. After months of logging her project on Twitter, she attracted the attention of many who needed a similar solution.

The main obstacle was that those who wanted to assemble the device themselves. Dana and others help with advice, but in the end it is everyone's responsibility to know how to debug the device. So, a cardiologist from the Bay Area is mastering programming to assemble a device for his one-year-old child, who was diagnosed in March.

The system includes a not very modern insulin pump, a radio module that communicates with a constantly working glucose sensor, a laptop computer on the board and a battery pack. The insulin pump looks like a pager–sized unit - it is engaged in constantly injecting insulin in the right doses through a catheter under the skin. The development was the development of another open project, in which those caring for diabetics were looking for a way to remotely monitor the blood sugar of loved ones.

The size of the installation is changing – the one worn by Andrew Calabrese has decreased step by step from the size of a shoe box to the size of a headphone case. Now the child is wearing an insulin pump and a computer on his belt.

Jason Calabrese clarifies that the development will not become a universal tool – primarily because the dosage of insulin in accordance with what is eaten is still calculated manually. In addition, the system is subject to technology flaws, such as rare pump failures and catheter blockages. But for all that, the father concludes, the algorithm is more disciplined. "People are poorly adapted for this; this is the lot of machines."

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  12.05.2016