Dr David Maahs Highlights Unmet Needs in Youth T1D Care

David Maahs, MD, PhD, professor of pediatrics at Stanford University and division chief of pediatric endocrinology at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital highlights 2 key areas of unmet needs in youth type 1 diabetes (T1D) care: access to diabetes technology and prevention of T1D.

Transcript

What unmet needs in youth T1D care do you hope to see addressed soon?

I think access to diabetes technology is incredibly important. I think there are still important advances that need to be made in refining that diabetes technology, specifically automated insulin delivery systems. However, they work very well. They're unequivocally A-level evidence, the best way right now that we have to achieve tight glucose control. They can also reduce the burden of caring for type 1 diabetes. So I think getting access increased so that everyone can benefit is really the number one priority, in my mind, as well as advancing these different technologies.

Another really important area of research is preventing type 1 diabetes, and there are some exciting developments. There was a recent paper in JAMA showing that verapamil, which is a medication that's generic, can help slow the decline in C-peptide, which is a marker of beta cells after diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. There's also recently been FDA approval of a medication called teplizumab, which is now commercially available. This is an immunomodulatory therapy that also has been shown to prevent the decline in beta cell destruction.

So, I think we have a lot of exciting work in both trying to improve care for people with diabetes but also trying to prevent type 1 diabetes, and there's a lot of progress in that area, more to be done, and ultimately to be able to cure diabetes. It's an exciting time to be in diabetes research and there is very much that needs to be done. And I just touched on a few of those. There are many, many more topics that are also extremely important for research.