The Artificial Pancreas in 2016: A Digital Treatment Ecosystem for Diabetes

With the increasing availability of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII), the artificial pancreas (AP) (the commonly accepted term for closed-loop control [CLC] of blood glucose [BG] levels in diabetes) has become a hot area in translational research and industrial development. After a prolonged period of inpatient, clinical research center trials using cumbersome systems, the field has progressed rapidly over the past 2 years to long-term, free-living studies running AP algorithms on smartphones. Although it is still not a cure, the AP is the most promising advance in the treatment of diabetes at this time. This issue of Diabetes Care presents today’s AP state of the art, including reports on multinational home-use AP trials, studies in young children, the use of multihormonal approaches to mitigate meal-related hyperglycemia, and discussions of AP study designs and outcome measures. This collection of articles establishes the AP as a new diabetes treatment paradigm—not a single-function CGM or CSII device but an adaptable wearable network encompassing the patient in a digital treatment ecosystem. In its May 2014 issue, Diabetes Care featured the progress in the AP field in a series of articles labeled “Advances in Artificial Pancreas Development.” In addition to an editorial discussing the state of the art of AP development in 2014 (1), the issue included original articles that covered a broad range of topics including analyses of the possible physiological inputs to CLC (2), real-time estimation of insulin sensitivity from CGM and insulin pump data (3), engineering of the AP algorithms (4), reports of predictive low-glucose suspend (LGS) systems (5), studies of overnight CLC at home (6), feasibility of the AP in type 2 diabetes (7), and the first around-the-clock outpatient CLC running a model predictive control (MPC) algorithm on a portable AP system (8). Since then, …