Is There a Cure for Type 1 Diabetes?

Although an insulin pump will never be a true cure for diabetes, some people hope that this technology can become so advanced that it will act almost as if it were a cure, removing almost all of the worries and burdens of people with type 1 diabetes. A theoretically perfect insulin pump system — one that could keep your blood sugar in range no matter what food or exercise decisions you made — would alleviate a massive amount of the cognitive and emotional burden of living with the disease.

Automated insulin delivery (AID) systems combine a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and an insulin pump so that they communicate with each other. A computer-controlled algorithm, which might reside in a smartphone or on the pump itself, decides exactly how much insulin you need, adjusting the delivery rate constantly around the clock.

But in the future, we may have AID systems that work so quickly that patients will no longer need to count their carbs. It’s possible to imagine a pump system so good that it lets you forget about your diabetes, at least for a few days at a time.