Researching Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes Treatments

 Egor Volcotrub, Verrazzano Class of 2022, completed major in General Biology 

I worked under the mentorship and supervision of Grozdena Yilmaz to complete my capstone project. The focus of my project was to collect data and show the effectiveness of technologies in treating Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.

Being a Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus patient myself and having work experience in endocrinology, I found that a wide population of patients suffering from those conditions are unaware or mistrust new technologies that help to improve their health.

Although sticking to traditional treatment methods (such as multiple daily insulin injections and  fingerstick testing) helps to treat diabetes, they are not as effective and comfortable as insulin pumps  and continuous glucose monitoring devices (CGMs). The initial goal of the capstone project was to  raise awareness among people who might be struggling with those conditions and could potentially  benefit from the available technologies.

For data collection, I used PubMed to find appropriate peer-reviewed articles and clinical data. Considering that the project was focused on the FDA-approved devices, all of them had clinical trial information available. Due to the fact that those devices are manufactured by unrelated pharmaceutical companies, the clinical trials were different in recruited patient’s population.

Although it initially created obstacles in combining data, all of them had a common comparison value used to indicate diabetic control. Another obstacle came from collecting data, specifically on the population suffering from Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM). Those patients may or may not require insulin injection, depending on the severity of their condition. Therefore, it is harder to recruit patients for those study groups, and not all companies have research data available for T2DM.

Overall, I felt like preparing the project and presenting it was a difficult task but having support from my advisor and peers I was able to overcome this obstacle. Not only I have collected valuable data to spread awareness on technologies that help treat diabetes, but I also found additional information that in the future will help me to manage the condition I am struggling with. As I have focused only on the most popular pharmaceutical devices, in the future, collecting information on other brands available can help to enhance the outcomes of this research project.