Crowdfunding for revolutionary insulin pump

🎬 Multilingual subtitles
✍️ By: Team BC1.NL

Implantable insulin pump

In the Netherlands, around 1,000 people have a form of diabetes that requires them to survive solely with an implantable insulin pump. The implantable DiaLin, which is being developed, is a matter of life and death for these individuals. Moreover, statistics show that a large group of patients would have a better quality of life if they could use this newly developed, revolutionary pump. Currently, they lead lives filled with hospital admissions and significant dependency, which ultimately costs much more.

What was wrong with the old pump?

The old pump is made of titanium, eight centimetres long and almost two centimetres thick, with two openings for the needles used to fill and rinse it. It lies under the skin and forms a protruding object there. You feel it move all the time when you walk or exert yourself.

What does the new pump look like?

Modular, in two parts. One part is the reservoir where the insulin goes, the other holds the electronics and carries the tube that goes into the abdomen. The reservoir looks a bit like a salmon fillet, and that shape is deliberate: it follows the anatomical curvature of the abdominal wall muscles.

How is it placed?

The reservoir part lies in the muscle and the other part on the muscle, just under the skin, so it can be removed and adjusted under local anaesthesia. The difference is clearest when you look at both systems from the side: the old pump is far thicker.

Crowdfunding

Through crowdfunding, efforts are being made to raise enough money to design and prepare the DiaLin for testing. An amount of approximately 1.5 million euros is needed for this.
The costs can be kept relatively low because the employees of IPaDiC working on this project do not receive a fixed income; they volunteer their time.