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What is Luna?
Luna was formed to bring the incredible and life-changing benefits of automated insulin delivery to the overwhelming majority of people living with diabetes who use insulin pens. The founding team has made some of the most widely-used diabetes products in the world. Using this history and experience, we are committed to making life with diabetes simpler, safer, and more balanced - through transformative design and a relentless focus on the user. Previously competitors, we are joining forces to deliver the gift of more restful sleep and magical mornings for people with diabetes.
They said it is impossible –
We’ve heard this for most of our careers.
We will prove them wrong. Again.
The History of Diabetes
Through the eyes of our founders
Invention of Insulin
Living with diabetes is hard - really hard. If it wasn’t for the creation of insulin by Banting, Macleod, and Best in 1921, many of us at Luna wouldn’t be alive today.
Backpack Insulin Pump
Can you imagine that the first insulin pump looked like this? Not very practical, but in the 1960’s it brought us a long way towards helping us learn how to infuse insulin and use basal rates. It would take four decades until the insulin pump became a practical, usable tool.
Blood Glucose Monitoring
It is hard to imagine that before 1980 there wasn’t a reliable way to measure blood glucose. The first blood glucose monitor developed by Ames led the revolution. Luna co-founder John Sjölund was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age four and remembers testing his blood glucose merely once a day.
Insulin Pens
Finally - a way to deliver insulin that was more accessible and convenient than a vial and syringe. Today, this is by far the most widely used method to deliver insulin with over 90% of all people living with diabetes using them. Simple, discreet, affordable, and untethered.
Continuous Glucose Monitoring
A diabetes revolution - a wearable sensor that would continuously monitor blood glucose. This provided a window into one's body to finally figure out how different food types affect blood glucose levels.
Luna co-founder Sean Saint was one of the early developers of CGM and upon discovery of his own undiagnosed Type 1 diabetes his life was changed forever.
“I understood the technical aspects of most diabetes technology, but in an instant everything changed and I gained a much more personal insight into diabetes. What was a challenging and rewarding “job” turned into a vocation."
-Sean Saint
Welldoc BlueStar®
Diabetes is a data-driven condition. Fats, carbs, proteins, blood glucose, insulin, insulin action time - it is overwhelming, bewildering, and requires a person to self-manage their disease 8,759 hours a year, seeing their only doctor 15 minutes every few months.
Welldoc’s vision was to use your phone to make sense of all of the data. Luna co-founder Jon Brilliant and the team at Welldoc developed and commercialized the first prescribable and reimbursed mobile app cleared by the FDA.
“We realized with the exploding population of people living with diabetes, healthcare was incapable of scaling fast enough to deliver human-based care and that we needed to find a way to leverage technology that was to become ubiquitous – the mobile phone, ushering in what is now called digital health/digital therapeutics.”
-Jon Brilliant
Timesulin®
Insulin is one of the most powerful and deadliest drugs in the world. Used correctly, it allows people with diabetes to thrive. Used incorrectly, it can be fatal. Timesulin was created by Luna co-founder John Sjölund and his team. Timesulin made it easy for people to know if they had taken an insulin injection or not.
“Doctors told me that nobody could possibly forget when they took their insulin. Use a logbook, they said, but I needed a simpler way that allowed me to spend less time on my diabetes, and more time living my life. With no extra work, Timesulin allowed people to feel safer by avoiding missed injections or dangerous double doses.”
-John Sjölund
Automated Insulin Delivery
The next major leap in diabetes technology was to connect the dots - a continuous glucose monitor, an insulin pump, and an algorithm working together to automatically deliver insulin in response to changing glucose.
A giant leap forward, but expensive, complicated, and intrusive making it out of reach for most. Even today, insulin pumps are used by less than 5% of all people who require insulin. Accessibility remains the greatest challenge to the adoption of automated insulin delivery.
InPen®
Tens of millions of people use insulin pens to treat their diabetes, but some say they are just glorified syringes. Without data, we cannot expect better outcomes or any relief from the burden of diabetes. Luna co-founder Sean Saint and his team at Companion Medical developed InPen®, the first connected insulin pen, and app-based bolus calculator. This gave pen users the functionality of an insulin pump without the associated burdens.
“InPen provides many, if not most, of the benefits of insulin pumps - dose logging, an insulin-on-board display, a dose calculator, and reminders to dose. InPen does not manage your diabetes for you but we hoped it would help make it a little bit easier.“
-Sean Saint
Bigfoot Unity®
Bigfoot was created to make life with diabetes easier. As a co-founder of Bigfoot, Luna co-founder Jon Brilliant and the team at Bigfoot saw the vision that Luna co-founder John Sjolund had for making life with insulin pens easier so they bought his company. Bigfoot Unity was the result. The backbone of the system was the concept of decision support. Simply scan the CGM sensor with the pen cap and a recommendation is delivered - relieving the burden of calculations and guessing. Life with diabetes became easier for people who use insulin pens to dose insulin.
