Table of Contents
Breakthrough T1D, formerly known as JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation), stands as a global leader in funding type 1 diabetes research and driving innovations that transform the lives of millions living with this autoimmune condition. In 2024, the international chapters of the organization began to change their name from JDRF to Breakthrough T1D, reflecting its focus on helping people of all ages, recognizing that type 1 diabetes affects individuals across the entire lifespan, not just children. One of the organization’s most critical and impactful areas of focus is the development of personalized insulin regimens—tailored treatment approaches that consider each person’s unique physiology, lifestyle, daily routines, and metabolic patterns to optimize blood sugar control and improve quality of life.
Understanding Breakthrough T1D’s Mission and Impact
Breakthrough T1D (formerly JDRF) is a type 1 diabetes (T1D) research and advocacy organization. Breakthrough T1D funds research for the development of new therapies and treatments for type 1 diabetes. The organization has been described as “the leading global organization funding T1D research”. Since its founding in 1970 by parents of children with type 1 diabetes, the organization has invested billions of dollars in research aimed at finding a cure, preventing the disease, and improving treatment options for those currently living with the condition.
65% of the treatments currently in human trials have been funded by JDRF, and this goes to 77% for the Phase-III and Phase-II studies! This remarkable statistic demonstrates the organization’s outsized influence on the diabetes research landscape. From early-stage laboratory investigations to advanced clinical trials, Breakthrough T1D has been instrumental in moving promising therapies from concept to reality, with a particular emphasis on technologies and treatments that enable more personalized approaches to diabetes management.
Why Personalized Insulin Therapy Matters
For decades, insulin therapy followed a relatively standardized approach—one that often failed to account for the tremendous variability between individuals. Traditional insulin regimens typically prescribed fixed doses based on general guidelines, body weight, or carbohydrate intake calculations that didn’t fully capture the complexity of how different bodies respond to insulin at different times of day, under varying stress levels, during different phases of the menstrual cycle, or in response to exercise, illness, and countless other factors.
This one-size-fits-all approach has significant limitations. What works perfectly for one person with type 1 diabetes may lead to dangerous hypoglycemia or persistent hyperglycemia in another. Individual insulin sensitivity can vary dramatically based on factors including age, hormonal fluctuations, physical activity levels, stress, sleep quality, medication interactions, and even the time of day. Some people experience pronounced “dawn phenomenon” with rising blood sugars in the early morning hours, while others struggle with post-meal glucose spikes or overnight lows.
Personalized insulin regimens aim to address these challenges by tailoring treatment to each individual’s specific needs and patterns. Rather than applying generic protocols, personalized approaches use data-driven insights to optimize insulin delivery timing, dosing, and type selection. This individualization can lead to more stable blood glucose levels, reduced risk of both hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia, fewer diabetes-related complications, and significantly improved quality of life. People spend less time managing their diabetes manually and more time living their lives with greater freedom and confidence.
How Breakthrough T1D Supports Personalized Insulin Innovation
Breakthrough T1D’s approach to supporting personalized insulin therapy is multifaceted, encompassing direct research funding, advocacy for regulatory pathways, partnerships with industry and academia, and community engagement. The organization strategically invests in technologies and methodologies that enable increasingly sophisticated individualization of diabetes treatment.
Artificial Pancreas and Automated Insulin Delivery Systems
One of Breakthrough T1D’s most significant contributions to personalized insulin therapy has been its pioneering support for artificial pancreas technology, now more commonly referred to as automated insulin delivery (AID) systems. In 2006, Breakthrough T1D launched the Artificial Pancreas Consortium, allocating $6 million in grants to investigate the benefits of technology controlling blood-glucose levels to accelerate the availability of the artificial pancreas (AP).
AP systems integrate three components—a CGM, an insulin pump, and an algorithm— to measure blood sugar, then calculate and administer, or withhold, insulin with minimal user input. These systems represent the pinnacle of personalized insulin therapy because they continuously adapt insulin delivery based on real-time glucose readings and predictive algorithms that learn from each individual’s patterns.
The impact of this investment has been transformative. In 2016, the FDA approved the first hybrid closed-loop, or AP, system. Since then, multiple commercial systems have reached the market, and research continues to advance toward fully automated systems that require even less user input. Glucose regulation is improving through the use of automated insulin delivery systems that combine glucose monitoring with insulin pumps.
Modern AID systems use sophisticated algorithms that personalize insulin delivery in real-time. These algorithms consider not just current glucose levels but also glucose trends, rate of change, time of day, and historical patterns specific to each user. Some systems can predict glucose levels up to 60 minutes in advance and automatically adjust basal insulin delivery every few minutes, increasing, decreasing, or pausing insulin as needed to maintain glucose levels within target range.
Continuous Glucose Monitoring Research
Personalized insulin therapy depends fundamentally on accurate, continuous data about glucose levels. In 2008, Breakthrough T1D funded a clinical trial that demonstrated the efficacy of continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) in helping to manage blood sugar, with lower HbA1c levels and reduced rates of severe hypoglycemia. The research confirmed substantial benefits for T1D patients, leading to insurance coverage of CGMs and more widespread use.
CGM technology has evolved dramatically since those early studies. Modern CGM systems provide glucose readings every few minutes, display trend arrows showing the direction and speed of glucose changes, and can alert users to impending highs or lows before they become dangerous. This continuous stream of personalized data enables both users and automated systems to make more informed, timely decisions about insulin dosing.
The integration of CGM data with insulin pumps creates a closed-loop system that personalizes insulin delivery automatically. Rather than relying on periodic finger-stick measurements and manual calculations, these integrated systems respond dynamically to each person’s unique glucose patterns throughout the day and night. This is particularly valuable during sleep, when manual monitoring is impractical and dangerous lows can go undetected.
Smart Insulin Pumps and Advanced Algorithms
Breakthrough T1D has consistently supported the development of increasingly intelligent insulin pumps that can adapt to individual user needs. Modern smart pumps go far beyond simple insulin delivery devices—they are sophisticated medical computers that incorporate machine learning algorithms, predictive analytics, and personalized settings.
These advanced pumps can store and analyze weeks or months of glucose and insulin data to identify patterns specific to each user. They can recognize that a particular person tends to need more insulin on Monday mornings, or that their insulin sensitivity increases during certain times of the menstrual cycle, or that they typically experience glucose rises after specific types of meals. The algorithms then use this personalized historical data to make better predictions and adjustments going forward.
Some of the most advanced systems now require minimal user input. For example, certain systems only need the user’s body weight and a general meal size estimation, rather than precise carbohydrate counting. The algorithm learns over time how that individual responds to meals and adjusts insulin delivery accordingly, creating a truly personalized treatment approach that evolves continuously.
Novel Insulin Formulations
Beyond delivery systems, Breakthrough T1D supports research into novel insulin formulations that enable more personalized therapy. The Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge has awarded £2.7 million (about $3.6 million) to six different projects aimed at developing novel insulins to treat patients with type 1 diabetes. The universities in the United States, Australia, and China that received the awards aim to design insulins that act faster and more precisely. The Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge is a partnership that includes Breakthrough T1D.
New-generation insulins (those that are ultrarapid, ultralong, and glucose-responsive) improve outcomes by minimising blood sugar fluctuations. Glucose-responsive or “smart” insulins represent a particularly exciting frontier—these formulations would automatically activate or deactivate based on blood glucose levels, providing insulin only when needed. This would create an inherently personalized response without requiring external devices or algorithms.
Ultra-rapid insulins allow for more precise mealtime dosing with less need to dose far in advance of eating, accommodating the reality of how people actually live their lives. Ultra-long insulins provide more stable basal coverage with less variability, reducing the risk of unexpected highs and lows. Together, these formulations give clinicians and patients more tools to customize insulin regimens to individual needs and preferences.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Breakthrough T1D continues to invest heavily in artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that enable unprecedented levels of personalization in insulin therapy. These advanced computational approaches can identify subtle patterns in glucose data that would be impossible for humans to detect, and they can make predictions and adjustments with a speed and precision that manual management cannot match.
Machine learning algorithms can analyze thousands of data points—glucose readings, insulin doses, meal timing and composition, exercise, stress levels, sleep quality, and more—to build highly personalized predictive models for each individual. These models continuously improve as they accumulate more data, becoming increasingly accurate at predicting how a specific person will respond to various situations and interventions.
Some AI-powered systems can now predict hypoglycemic events hours in advance, allowing for preventive action rather than reactive treatment. Others can optimize basal insulin rates throughout the day based on patterns that emerge over weeks or months. Still others can provide personalized recommendations for insulin dosing at mealtimes, accounting for the specific foods being consumed, the time of day, recent activity levels, and current glucose trends.
The integration of AI into diabetes management represents a fundamental shift toward truly personalized medicine. Rather than applying population-level guidelines to individuals, AI enables treatment protocols that are optimized for each person’s unique physiology and circumstances. As these technologies mature and become more widely available, they promise to dramatically improve outcomes while reducing the burden of diabetes management.
Disease-Modifying Therapies and Beta Cell Preservation
While much of the focus on personalized insulin therapy involves optimizing insulin delivery, Breakthrough T1D also supports research into disease-modifying therapies that could reduce or eliminate the need for external insulin altogether. These approaches aim to preserve remaining beta cell function in newly diagnosed individuals or even regenerate insulin-producing cells.
Teplizumab, the first immunotherapy treatment to delay the onset of clinical type 1 diabetes, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. This represents a breakthrough in personalized medicine for type 1 diabetes—the ability to intervene before or shortly after diagnosis to preserve beta cell function means that individuals may maintain some natural insulin production, making blood sugar management easier and more stable.
In a JDRF-funded study, researchers discovered that Verapamil, a drug approved to treat high blood pressure, could, in some cases, assist diagnosed T1D teens and children to produce more insulin, thereby stabilizing the insulin-producing beta cells. This type of research opens possibilities for highly personalized treatment approaches where some individuals might benefit from medications that preserve their remaining insulin production, reducing their dependence on external insulin.
Eli Lilly launched two new pivotal clinical trials for baricitinib, a JAK inhibitor that is already approved for other autoimmune diseases. The trials will test whether baricitinib—which is taken as a once-daily oral pill—can delay the progression of stage 2 to stage 3 T1D (BARICADE-DELAY) or preserve beta cells in newly diagnosed stage 3 T1D (BARICADE-PRESERVE). These disease-modifying approaches could enable more personalized treatment strategies where insulin needs are reduced or stabilized rather than progressively increasing over time.
Stem Cell Therapies and Beta Cell Replacement
Perhaps the most revolutionary approach to personalized insulin therapy involves replacing lost beta cells entirely, potentially eliminating the need for external insulin. Breakthrough T1D has been instrumental in advancing stem cell-based therapies from laboratory concepts to clinical reality.
JDRF’s involvement can first be traced back to 2000, when Douglas Melton, Ph.D. was given a JDRF grant to make insulin-producing beta cells from stem cells—which he did in 2014. In 2015 Dr. Melton founded Semma Therapeutics to develop these stem cells into curative therapies for T1D. In 2017, the JDRF T1D Fund made a significant investment in Semma. In 2019, Vertex acquired Semma for almost $1 billion USD.
The resulting therapy, now called Zimislecel, has shown remarkable results. All patients have achieved an HbA1C below 7.0% and time-in-range above 70% on continuous glucose monitoring with the reduced or eliminated insulin administration. This trial is progressing very well and Vertex is planning for regulatory submission in 2026.
β-cell replacement is shifting from traditional transplantation of organ donor islets and the pancreas to stem cell-derived β cells. Bioengineering methods, such as encapsulation, and gene editing to create hypoimmune cells could reduce the need for immunosuppression that has hampered β-cell replacement, and patient-derived stem cells open doors to personalised therapies. The ability to use a patient’s own cells to generate insulin-producing tissue represents the ultimate in personalized medicine—treatment literally tailored to the individual at the cellular level.
These beta cell replacement approaches could fundamentally transform type 1 diabetes from a condition requiring constant external insulin management to one where the body’s natural insulin production is restored. While challenges remain, particularly around protecting transplanted cells from immune attack, the progress in this field has been extraordinary and offers hope for a functional cure.
Real-World Impact on Patients
The innovations supported by Breakthrough T1D in personalized insulin therapy are already making a profound difference in the daily lives of people with type 1 diabetes. The benefits extend far beyond improved glucose numbers—they encompass quality of life, mental health, safety, and long-term health outcomes.
Improved Glycemic Control
Personalized insulin regimens enabled by advanced technologies consistently demonstrate superior glycemic control compared to traditional approaches. Studies of automated insulin delivery systems show significant increases in time-in-range—the percentage of time that glucose levels remain within the target zone of 70-180 mg/dL. Many users of these systems achieve time-in-range above 70%, a level that was nearly impossible with manual insulin management for most people.
Higher time-in-range translates directly to reduced risk of both short-term complications like severe hypoglycemia and long-term complications including retinopathy, nephropathy, neuropathy, and cardiovascular disease. Even modest improvements in average glucose control can significantly reduce the risk of these devastating complications over a lifetime.
Reduced Hypoglycemia Risk
One of the most significant benefits of personalized insulin therapy is the dramatic reduction in hypoglycemia, particularly severe episodes that require assistance from others. Hypoglycemia is not only dangerous in the moment—it can cause seizures, loss of consciousness, accidents, and even death—but repeated episodes can lead to hypoglycemia unawareness, where the body loses its ability to recognize and respond to low blood sugar.
Automated insulin delivery systems with predictive algorithms can suspend or reduce insulin delivery before glucose levels drop too low, preventing many hypoglycemic episodes before they occur. This is particularly valuable overnight, when people are asleep and unable to recognize or treat lows. Parents of children with type 1 diabetes often report that these systems allow them to sleep through the night for the first time in years, no longer needing to wake multiple times to check blood sugars.
Decreased Management Burden
Perhaps equally important as the clinical benefits are the improvements in quality of life that come from reduced management burden. Traditional insulin therapy requires constant vigilance—checking blood sugar multiple times daily, counting carbohydrates at every meal, calculating insulin doses, timing injections or boluses appropriately, and making countless daily decisions about diabetes management.
Personalized automated systems handle much of this burden automatically. While users still need to input meal information and monitor the system, the cognitive load is dramatically reduced. The system makes thousands of micro-adjustments to insulin delivery that would be impossible for a person to manage manually. This frees people to focus on living their lives rather than constantly managing their diabetes.
The psychological benefits of this reduced burden are substantial. Many people with type 1 diabetes experience diabetes distress, burnout, anxiety, and depression related to the relentless demands of disease management. Technologies that reduce this burden can significantly improve mental health and overall well-being.
Greater Flexibility and Freedom
Personalized insulin therapy enables greater flexibility in daily life. With systems that automatically adjust to changing circumstances, people can more easily accommodate variations in meal timing, spontaneous physical activity, travel across time zones, illness, stress, and other factors that affect blood sugar. They don’t need to maintain rigid schedules or avoid activities that might complicate diabetes management.
This flexibility is particularly valuable for children and adolescents, allowing them to participate fully in school, sports, social activities, and other aspects of normal childhood without constant interruption for diabetes management. It also benefits adults who can pursue careers, travel, exercise, and maintain social lives without diabetes imposing constant constraints.
Addressing Health Equity and Access
While the technological advances in personalized insulin therapy are remarkable, Breakthrough T1D recognizes that innovation alone is insufficient if these life-changing treatments remain inaccessible to many who need them. The organization actively advocates for policies and programs that improve access to advanced diabetes technologies and affordable insulin.
Civica Rx’s insulin glargine-ygfn (which is interchangeable with Lantus®), will be available on January 1, 2026, for no more than $55 for five pens. Anyone with a prescription—regardless of insurance status—will be able to purchase it at a pharmacy. Breakthrough T1D has been working with Civica for nearly three years to make this possible. This initiative addresses the critical issue of insulin affordability, ensuring that cost doesn’t prevent people from accessing the insulin they need for personalized regimens.
The organization also advocates for insurance coverage of continuous glucose monitors, insulin pumps, and automated insulin delivery systems. Without adequate coverage, these technologies remain out of reach for many families, creating disparities in outcomes based on socioeconomic status. Breakthrough T1D works with policymakers, insurers, and healthcare systems to expand access and reduce barriers to advanced diabetes care.
Addressing health equity also means ensuring that research includes diverse populations and that technologies are designed to work for people with different backgrounds, lifestyles, and needs. Breakthrough T1D supports research that examines how diabetes technologies perform across different demographic groups and works to identify and address disparities in access and outcomes.
The Future of Personalized Insulin Therapy
The trajectory of personalized insulin therapy points toward increasingly sophisticated, automated, and individualized approaches. Breakthrough T1D continues to invest in next-generation technologies that will further reduce the burden of diabetes management while improving outcomes.
Fully Automated Systems
Current automated insulin delivery systems are “hybrid” closed-loop systems, meaning they still require user input for meals and certain other situations. The next frontier is fully automated systems that require no manual insulin dosing or meal announcements. These systems would use advanced algorithms and potentially additional sensors to detect meals, exercise, and other factors automatically, adjusting insulin delivery without user intervention.
Research is underway on systems that can detect meals through various means—changes in glucose patterns, heart rate, physical activity, or even direct detection of food intake. Some experimental systems incorporate additional hormones like glucagon or amylin to more closely mimic the natural endocrine function of the pancreas. These dual-hormone or multi-hormone systems could provide even better glucose control with less risk of hypoglycemia.
Integration with Digital Health Ecosystems
Future personalized insulin therapy will likely integrate seamlessly with broader digital health ecosystems. Diabetes management systems could connect with fitness trackers, sleep monitors, nutrition apps, electronic health records, and other data sources to create a comprehensive picture of each individual’s health and automatically adjust insulin delivery based on all available information.
Artificial intelligence could analyze this integrated data to provide increasingly personalized recommendations and predictions. For example, a system might recognize that a particular person’s insulin needs increase during periods of poor sleep, or that certain types of stress affect their glucose levels in predictable ways, and automatically adjust insulin delivery accordingly.
Telemedicine integration could allow healthcare providers to monitor patients’ diabetes management remotely and make adjustments to treatment plans based on real-time data. This could be particularly valuable for people in rural areas or those with limited access to specialized diabetes care.
Implantable and Non-Invasive Technologies
While current systems require external devices and sensors that penetrate the skin, future technologies may include fully implantable artificial pancreas systems or non-invasive glucose monitoring. Implantable systems could eliminate the need for frequent sensor and infusion set changes, reducing the physical burden of diabetes management and improving quality of life.
Non-invasive glucose monitoring—measuring glucose through the skin without needles—has been a long-sought goal in diabetes technology. While technical challenges have proven formidable, research continues, and breakthroughs in this area could make continuous glucose monitoring more acceptable and accessible to more people.
Glucose-Responsive Insulins
Perhaps the most elegant solution to personalized insulin therapy would be glucose-responsive or “smart” insulins that automatically activate when blood sugar rises and deactivate when it falls. These formulations would provide inherently personalized insulin delivery without requiring any external devices or algorithms.
Multiple research groups are working on various approaches to glucose-responsive insulin, including chemical modifications that change insulin’s activity based on glucose concentration, and delivery systems that release insulin in response to glucose levels. While significant technical hurdles remain, successful development of these insulins could revolutionize diabetes treatment, potentially reducing it to a simple injection once daily or even less frequently.
Regenerative Medicine and Cure
The ultimate goal of personalized medicine for type 1 diabetes is not just optimizing insulin therapy but eliminating the need for it entirely through regenerative approaches. Replacing the destroyed beta cells from sources outside the body, or regenerating beta cells from within the body, holds promise to reverse T1D.
Breakthrough T1D has been involved from an early stage of this research, with this breakthrough an extension of previous Breakthrough T1D-funded work also led by Professor El-Osta and his team. Further work with pre-clinical models is now needed to take this research to the next stage. This is why we have already committed over $1 million to extend this project. This commitment to regenerative medicine research reflects the organization’s vision of a world where type 1 diabetes can be cured, not just managed.
Multiple approaches are being pursued simultaneously—stem cell-derived beta cells, gene therapies to regenerate beta cells from other pancreatic cells, immunotherapies to stop the autoimmune attack and allow remaining beta cells to recover, and combinations of these approaches. As these therapies advance through clinical trials and toward approval, they will offer increasingly personalized options based on each individual’s stage of disease, remaining beta cell function, and other factors.
Challenges and Ongoing Research Needs
Despite tremendous progress, significant challenges remain in developing and deploying personalized insulin therapy. Breakthrough T1D continues to support research addressing these challenges to ensure that innovations translate into real-world benefits for all people with type 1 diabetes.
Sensor Accuracy and Reliability
Personalized automated insulin delivery depends fundamentally on accurate glucose sensing. While continuous glucose monitors have improved dramatically, they still have limitations. Sensors can be affected by factors like compression, dehydration, certain medications, and individual physiological variations. Improving sensor accuracy, particularly during rapid glucose changes and at extreme glucose values, remains an important research priority.
Sensor reliability is also critical—sensors that fail prematurely or provide erratic readings can undermine confidence in automated systems and lead to poor outcomes. Research into more robust sensor designs, better calibration algorithms, and redundant sensing approaches continues to address these challenges.
Algorithm Optimization
While current algorithms for automated insulin delivery are sophisticated, there is substantial room for improvement. Algorithms must balance competing goals—maintaining tight glucose control while minimizing hypoglycemia risk, responding quickly to glucose changes while avoiding overreaction, and accommodating individual variability while maintaining safety.
Research continues on more advanced algorithms that can better predict glucose trajectories, adapt more quickly to changing circumstances, learn from individual patterns more effectively, and handle challenging situations like exercise, illness, and hormonal fluctuations. Machine learning approaches show particular promise for creating algorithms that continuously improve their performance for each individual user.
User Experience and Human Factors
Technology is only effective if people actually use it, and use it correctly. User experience design is critical for ensuring that personalized insulin therapy systems are intuitive, reliable, and fit seamlessly into people’s lives. Research into human factors—how people interact with diabetes technologies, what barriers prevent adoption or consistent use, and how to design systems that work for diverse users—is essential.
This includes addressing issues like alarm fatigue from excessive alerts, complexity of setup and configuration, physical comfort of wearable devices, and psychological factors that affect technology adoption. Systems must work for children and elderly adults, for people with varying levels of technical sophistication, and for diverse cultural contexts and lifestyles.
Interoperability and Data Integration
The diabetes technology landscape includes devices from multiple manufacturers, each with their own proprietary systems and data formats. Lack of interoperability limits personalization—people may be unable to use their preferred combination of devices, and data from different sources may not integrate effectively.
Breakthrough T1D advocates for open standards and interoperability that would allow people to mix and match components from different manufacturers and integrate diabetes data with other health information systems. This would enable more personalized solutions tailored to individual preferences and needs, and would facilitate innovation by allowing new technologies to work with existing systems.
The Role of Community and Advocacy
Breakthrough T1D’s impact extends beyond direct research funding to include community engagement and advocacy that accelerates the development and adoption of personalized insulin therapy. The organization brings together researchers, clinicians, industry partners, regulators, payers, and people with type 1 diabetes to identify priorities, overcome barriers, and drive progress.
The organization’s advocacy efforts have been instrumental in creating regulatory pathways for novel diabetes technologies, securing research funding through programs like the Special Diabetes Program, and improving insurance coverage for advanced treatments. Breakthrough T1D has been supporting the “Special Diabetes Program” (SDP) for 25 years. The program, which receives over $150 million in federal funding per year, provides resources and support for T1D research in cooperation with the NIH.
Community engagement ensures that research priorities reflect the real needs and preferences of people living with type 1 diabetes. Breakthrough T1D facilitates input from the diabetes community into research design, technology development, and policy decisions. This patient-centered approach helps ensure that innovations in personalized insulin therapy address the issues that matter most to those who will use them.
Global Perspective and International Collaboration
Type 1 diabetes is a global challenge, and Breakthrough T1D operates internationally to advance personalized insulin therapy worldwide. The organization has chapters in multiple countries and supports research collaborations across borders. At Kids in the House in November 2024, Minister for Health and Aged Care, Hon Mark Butler MP, committed $50.1m to research by Breakthrough T1D; Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care, Senator the Hon Anne Ruston, confirming a matched commitment. This demonstrates the organization’s global reach and impact.
International collaboration accelerates progress by enabling larger studies, sharing of data and expertise, and coordination of research efforts. It also helps ensure that innovations in personalized insulin therapy are developed with consideration for diverse populations and healthcare systems, improving the likelihood that advances will benefit people with type 1 diabetes everywhere, not just in wealthy countries.
Conclusion: A Vision for the Future
Breakthrough T1D’s support for personalized insulin regimens represents a comprehensive, strategic approach to transforming type 1 diabetes care. From pioneering artificial pancreas technology to advancing stem cell therapies, from improving insulin formulations to advocating for access and affordability, the organization is driving progress on multiple fronts simultaneously.
The impact of this work is already evident in the lives of people using automated insulin delivery systems, continuous glucose monitors, and other advanced technologies. These innovations have moved personalized insulin therapy from a theoretical concept to a practical reality that is improving outcomes and quality of life for hundreds of thousands of people.
Yet the work is far from complete. Breakthrough T1D continues to push toward even more sophisticated personalization, greater automation, improved access, and ultimately, therapies that eliminate the need for external insulin entirely. Breakthrough T1D CEO Aaron Kowalski said, “Our name and look have changed, but our mission has not! We are executing an ambitious plan to drive cures, and our job won’t be done until everyone can take their diabetes devices off for good.”
This vision—of a world where type 1 diabetes is cured, or at minimum, managed so effectively that it no longer limits what people can achieve—drives the organization’s continued investment in personalized insulin therapy research. Every advance brings that vision closer to reality, offering hope to the millions of people worldwide living with type 1 diabetes and the many more who will be diagnosed in the years to come.
For more information about Breakthrough T1D’s research initiatives and how to support their mission, visit https://www.breakthrought1d.org. To learn more about automated insulin delivery systems and other diabetes technologies, resources are available through organizations like the American Diabetes Association and DiaTribe. For information about clinical trials in type 1 diabetes, visit ClinicalTrials.gov. Those interested in the latest diabetes research can explore publications from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
The journey toward optimal personalized insulin therapy continues, driven by scientific innovation, community advocacy, and the unwavering commitment of organizations like Breakthrough T1D to improve and ultimately cure type 1 diabetes. With each technological advance, each successful clinical trial, and each policy victory, the future becomes brighter for people living with this challenging condition.