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The History of Diabetes
Through the eyes of our founders
Invention of insulin 1921
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.
Backpack insulin pump
Can you imagine that the first insulin pump looked like this? Not very practical, but in the 1960’s they went a long way in helping us learn about how to infuse insulin and using basal rates. It would take four decades until insulin pumps became a practicable 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 glucose monitor developed by AMES led the revolution. Luna founder John Sjölund was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age four and remembers testing his BG’s a mere one time every day.
Insulin Pens
Finally - a way to deliver insulin that was more accessible and convenient to a vial and syringe. Even today, this is by far the most widely used way 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 glucose. This provided a window into one's body to finally figure out how different food types affect blood glucose levels.
Luna founder, Sean Saint, was one of the earliest employees developing the first Dexcom® product as when he developed Type 1 diabetes. He diagnosed himself with one of the earliest Dexcom® sensors and his life changed forever.
“I knew the technical aspects of blood glucose and technology to measure levels, but all of the sudden I gained an insight into this disease on a level that I never expected. It changed my mindset as an engineer from ‘fixing a problem’ to ‘fixing MY problem’.”
-Sean Saint
Welldoc BlueStar®
Diabetes is a data-driven condition. Fats, carbs, proteints, 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 the then emerging mobile phone to make sense of all of the data and Jon and the team at Welldoc became the first prescribable, reimbursable mobile app cleared by the FDA. This resulted in clinically-validated better outcomes and lower total cost of care. Using real world data, BlueStar® is like a doctor in your pocket coaching you through your day.
“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. With so many people worried about the risk of a double dose, the world's first accessory for an insulin pen was created by John and his team at Timesulin®. 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® allows people to feel safer with their diabetes while avoiding missed injections or dangerous double doses.”
-John Sjölund
Automated insulin delivery
The next major leap in diabetes: Connecting the dots. A continuous glucose monitor, an insulin pump, and an algorithm working together to automatically deliver insulin in response to changing glucose. The Medtronic® 670G was the first FDA cleared automated insulin delivery system. Seems like the magic pill right?
A giant leap forward, but expensive, complicated, and intrusive. Even today, insulin pumps are still used by less than 5% of all people who need insulin. We still have a long way to go to make this accessible.
InPen®
Tens of millions of people use insulin pens to treat their diabetes, but there is no data collected. Come on, in the late 2000’s when cars can drive themselves, but you can’t get any data from your insulin pen? Sean and his team at Companion Medical® solved this with the development of the InPen®. InPen® was the world’s first connected insulin pen, the first insulin pen with a bolus calculator - a major leap forward for pen users, giving the functionality of an insulin pump to the majority who use pens. InPen was such a phenomenon that it was acquired by Medtronic in 2020.
“The InPen® provides many if not most of the benefits of smart insulin pumps. Dose memory, an insulin on board display, a dose calculator and a reminder to dose. The 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 - ahhh the myth of Bigfoot, this is where John & Jon crossed paths for the first time. Bigfoot was created to make life with diabetes easier. Bigfoot Unity was the result, the vision John had for making life with insulin pens easier. Here the concept of decision support was introduced. Scan your pen to your CGM sensor… beep…It tells you what to do. It takes away so much of the thinking of diabetes, it takes away the math. Life with diabetes got much easier for the vast majority who use pens to take insulin.
Luna Diabetes®
Founded by industry veterans who have been touched by diabetes in one way or another. Luna Diabetes is addressing one of the single largest challenge in all of diabetes management — nighttime glucose control for insulin pen users.We have hand-selected the most experienced engineers, UI developers, algorithm developers, and others to create Luna. Our goal is simple: to bring the most advanced and easiest-to-use technology to the largest number of people living with diabetes possible.
