SUPPORT FOR PEOPLE WITH DIABETES

Diabetes is a challenge in many people’s lives. We work with medical device manufacturers to create new solutions for people with diabetes, combining advanced materials and technology so diabetics can monitor blood glucose and have insulin delivered automatically.

Our bodies have a perfect system for making sure our food and drink is turned into energy we can use. It’s called the pancreas. When it’s working properly, the insulin it produces ensures that glucose in our bloodstream is turned into fuel for our cells. The pancreas maintains the optimum balance between glucose and insulin, so most of us never have to think about it.

For people with diabetes, this biological system has broken down. As a consequence, monitoring blood glucose levels and delivering insulin doses are challenges they have to deal with every day. There’s little room for error. Too much blood glucose – or too little – can impose serious health consequences.

But when nature fails, science sometimes has the answer. The treatment of diabetes is one space where this is happening. SABIC provides materials for continuous glucose monitors and for automatic insulin injectors and insulin pens. We are also working with companies that are developing a closed-loop system that acts like an artificial pancreas, delivering the right dosage of insulin exactly when it’s needed. Mounted on the patient’s skin, the devices need to be small, strong, lightweight, and administer insulin flawlessly. Specially formulated SABIC polymers offer the performance features needed to make this innovation a reality.

With less need to constantly monitor and manage their blood glucose levels, people with diabetes can go about their lives with more ease.