Key Quotes from this Year’s Carb DM Diabetes Summit

By Melissa An

We recently traveled down to very sunny Palo Alto for Carb DM’s second annual Bay Area Diabetes Summit. The Summit is growing fast, with 380 attendees registered this year – all highly engaged, passionate members of the type 1 diabetes community. The Summit had a large focus on the artificial pancreas, and we’re providing some of the highlight “quotable quotes” from the conference below:

“Everyone has been pushing the FDA, and the Agency has done a tremendous job in moving this [an artificial pancreas] forward…What are the risks of going commercial? There is a huge liability that goes with that. But if you look at the people without an artificial pancreas, there are many more risks than having the system in place.”

– Dr. Bruce Buckingham (Stanford University) on the FDA’s role in the regulation of artificial pancreas systems. [Editor's note: boy do we think he is right! We’re so lucky to have this brilliant doctor and researcher in our midst –Kelly and Adam are both in an artificial pancreas trial with his group now!].

“What we’re seeing from the FDA’s Center for Devices is that they understand that this is a population at risk so they’re not looking for perfection. They’re looking at this in terms of relative risk…and they’re willing to take the risks on. That’s new for them.”

– Dr. Ed Damiano (Boston University) on the FDA’s role in the regulation of artificial pancreas systems.

Dr. Saleh Adi (UCSF) also shared some of his top picks for the past year’s most exciting progress in type 1 diabetes, including:

“A lot of progress is happening in stem cell research to make beta cells and immune modulation.”
“Repurposing type 2 drugs for type 1 like metformin and SGLT-2 inhibitors. We need to start thinking about how we are going to design studies for the use of these drugs in type 1 diabetes.”
“Real-time CGM data transfer – Dexcom SHARE. I’ve already signed up for lots of my patients to send me their info to my iPhone!”
“The FDA has changed their rules, speeding up the approval of new devices. This is culminating in some exciting changes already and more are likely to come.”