- [Toby] When your child is diagnosed
with diabetes as an infant,
you have to do everything.
Diabetes care is 24/7.
It does not take the night off.
David is gonna be one year old in a few days.
(sneezes)
And two days ago he was diagnosed with diabetes.
He doesn't look too sad about it.
(laughs)
- Daddy came and got you.
- [Father] Hello, baby David.
Do you want some?
He was about 11 months old.
And my wife, Toby, was a young pediatrician at the time.
So she had a really keen eye for problems in children.
- [Tob] One thing that had happened,
which was quite scary,
is I went to get him out of the car seat,
and when I went to get him,
he was just kind of staring.
Vacant, eyes open, but vacant.
It was very alarming, very unusual behavior.
- [Ed] And so she brought him in to clinic.
His blood sugar was 800,
which is eight times the normal blood sugar level.
She collected him,
put him in the car,
raced out the door and said,
"David has diabetes, and our lives have changed forever."
And the task was upon us to manage his blood sugar levels.
We really had two tools at our disposal.
We had insulin and we had glucose,
sugar, basically.
Carbohydrates,
which is in foods like fruit,
juices.
Foods that would raise blood sugar, carbohydrates,
we would use to keep his blood sugar from going too low.
And then insulin was delivered
to bring his blood sugar down.
So these things are working to oppose one another.
And the reason you need the carbohydrates
is because you can very often overdose insulin
just a little bit.
But even a small amount of insulin can be lethal.
We were injecting him with insulin
with a needle probably seven times a day.
We were checking his blood sugar 15 times a day.
That's how we started.
When we checked his blood sugar,
we used his fingers and his toes,
so if he was playing with blocks in the middle of the room,
I'd come up and I'd poke him in a toe.
He had bruises up and down his arms
for those first two months
when we were giving him injections.
That was something that was really hard for us to see.
(laughs)
(dad laughs)
You're constantly in this tension
between high blood sugar and low blood sugar,
because neither extreme is acceptable.
- [Toby] There was so much work to be done.
So all of my faculties were focused on
taking care of this little boy.
I guess with my training it was just too hard to think about
that he would be compromised
because I didn't do a good job.
And with Ed's personality,
that wasn't gonna happen.
(Ed laughs)
- Ready, go.
Come on, let's go get him.
The scariest prospect that we, his parents, face,
is this phenomenon called dead in bed syndrome.
With people with type one diabetes,
there's a small number of people who go to bed at night,
and they don't wake up.
This is his glucose level over the past
roughly three hours.
You can see the fact that he's going down,
means that if he weren't about to eat,
he could go low.
But fortunately we're gonna be feeding him with rice
and things that will make him go higher.
- I put the test strip in the meter.
I draw up some blood,
if it works.
Just scoop up a little into the test strip.
104.
- I'm just gonna see how it's going.
All right, give it a stir.
- Here you go.
- All right, there you go.
There's the carbohydrates.
- So David, we need to check on the blood sugar situation.
We can take good care of David,
day and night, 24/7, seven days a week.
But what happens when he goes to college?
I wouldn't be there, my wife wouldn't be there
to manage his blood sugars for him,
or to help him take care of his diabetes.
And that overriding concern,
worry, and fear that I had
that really inspired, in my mind,
the idea of building a bionic pancreas,
a system that would basically
take care of his diabetes for us in our absence,
automatically.
Better than we could, and more safely than we could.
I like that idea.
The fact that Toby's a pediatrician,
I was an engineer,
that's really what started us down that path.
The bionic pancreas really builds on the shoulders
of decades of technology development in medical devices.
It comes from the synthesis of continuous glucose monitors,
from insulin pumps from smart phones.
And it's the integration of those three technologies
that makes a system which is really better
than the sum of its parts.
It's basically got automated decision making software
that determines how much drug to deliver to the person
with type one diabetes every five minutes.
It makes 288 decisions every day
that you no longer have to make.
- Well, a dad's invention to save his diabetic son
could change the lives of millions of people with diabetes.
It is today's big idea.
Ed Damiano developed the bionic pancreas.
- How confident are you that your dad can meet this goal
and make this deadline to get you off to college safely?
- I don't doubt that he can do it.
It's definitely very challenging.
But if anyone could do it, my dad could.
I think what we have to look forward to
is that our device will play a meaningful role
in keeping all those people
with type one diabetes who use it
safe and healthy until there is a biological cure.