Lilly Debuts 1st Insulin Pen with Memory Chip
Eli Lilly and company launched a new tool in the fight to manage diabetes. It is a pen that delivers insulin and it will keep a log of your most recent doses.
Twenty-three-year-old financial planner Jonathan Bostrom knows how important keeping track of details is to his professional life and to managing his diabetes.
“I got to make sure I have that certain amount of food that I need, certain calorie? and carbohydrates and that I eat it in a certain amount of time,” he said.
Jonathan uses a pump to control his insulin doses. It keeps track of when he takes a dose and how much he has taken.
“I’ll take it right before breakfast, lunch and dinner and bedtime snack,” Jonathan said.
Now Eli Lilly and company has launched an insulin pen, another form of delivering insulin. It is the first pen on the market with a memory; it remembers a diabetic’s last 16 doses.
“Having the ability to just push a button and know when you took it and how much you took is clearly an advancement in the management of diabetes,” said Scott MacGregor of Eli Lilly.
Lilly hopes the Memoir Pen, that is used with their billion dollar a year insulin product, Humalog, will help boost the use of pens for insulin delivery. Now, less than 20 percent of Americans who use insulin use a pen to inject it.
“We hope that the introduction of our pens will help move the U.S market in that direction and we want to be the leaders in pen device technology,” MacGregor.
As someone who has had diabetes for 13 years, Jonathan believes the answer to managing diabetes lies primarily in self-discipline, with a helping hand from technology.
“OK, I have a great amount of discipline in taking care of myself and these tools are going to help me get further to that goal of really nailing my blood sugar where I want it to be so that I avoid those problems in the future,” said Jonathan.
The Memoir Pen costs $100 plus the cost of insulin cartridges. The price could hold back some people and some insurance companies from jumping on board with the pen. But Lilly believes it will catch on because they say it is more accurate than using a vial and syringe. source
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