A different take on diabetes

We believe diabetes is not a disease. It’s an umbrella term for chronic high blood glucose. And underneath that umbrella, there are other umbrella terms like “type 1 diabetes”, “type 2 diabetes”, “MODY”, and a few others. But there are possibly hundreds of different conditions rolled up under these broad classifications, and because of this rudimentary scientific understanding, we have only rudimentary treatments.

In this video we break down our view of diabetes in plain words and explain what it’s like to treat it with insulin.

When we eat, our bodies turn our food into glucose and push it into our bloodstream which carries it around to give us energy. It’s a complex set of long-running chain reactions across many hormones, tissues and organs and everything we do affects it. It’s breaking for millions of people and no one fully understands what’s broken and why. If it breaks for you, you’ll be said to have diabetes. If the way it breaks for you leaves you short of insulin, you’ll be prescribed a general treatment of insulin, diet and activity. Because of all the unknowns, the treatment will be too general for your condition.

The future

Each day you’ll develop your own “rules of thumb” and recipes to make it work. Imagine a future where your phone learns and refines all these recipes for you, and finds new ones, anticipating when you need them, and recalling them for you in that moment. Imagine millions of people doing the same thing, new clusters of people with similar heuristics will appear, meaning you can borrow rules of thumb from other people like you and help the ecosystem create a treatment that fits you better.

We’re currently working with people who take insulin and researchers to validate our approach and and create new science. Join our research programme and help us turn the experience of people living with diabetes into science.