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Amin Zayani talks with Diabetes in Control Publisher Steve Freed during the ADA 77th Scientific Session in San Diego about why MedAngel ONE can effectively help patients with diabetes ensure the safety of their insulin and avoid the financial burden of having to replace damaged insulin.
Amin Zayani is the founder and CEO of MedAngel. He works with his team of engineers, pharmacists and designers on improving drugs safety for patients who live with diabetes and rely on temperature sensitive drugs like insulin.
Transcript of this video segment:
Steve Freed: For someone that says, I’ve been taking insulin for 40 years and never an issue, how do you answer that?
Amin Zayani: It’s very simple, it’s like anyone who tells you my grandma died at 110 and she smoked every day. It doesn’t mean that smoking doesn’t kill, it just means that she got lucky. Until, the 60s and 70s, pregnant women used to smoke and drink and that was not a problem, but I want to say is that if we look back and we see how things were before an innovation or an invention comes, and many people are satisfied. For example, before the invention of seat belt, nobody put a seat belt on. But once seat belts were available in every car and it became a legal obligation to put them on, everybody started putting them on. I think that there will always be people who will deny stuff, like smoking doesn’t kill or whatever, but the science and the logic is very straightforward and I believe that I’m really happy that the awareness about this problem is raising. The advocates are really vocal about it. The new generation of doctors and professionals are aware of it and I predict that in the next one to three years there will be a temperature monitor in every refrigerator and with every insulin pen and vial. Maybe not made by Med Angel because there are newcomers on the scene as well. But I think it will be standard, very soon.
Steve Freed: Are there any numbers that we can look at. If I’m a Type 1 diabetic and I’ve had diabetes for 40 years. What are the chances, the storage of the insulin will degrade enough where it will probably use it without knowing. What are the chances that that will happen?
Amin Zayani: It’s 100% over 40 years because the study I referred to, I can send a link or reference to it showed that. It’s a study in the Netherlands and they took 275 patients who store medication in their domestic refrigerator and 93% of them failed to store them according to manufacturer’s recommendations and this was only in 3 months. So you extrapolate for 40 years.
Steve Freed: So, a bottle of insulin now costs, let’s say on average $400 a vial in the US. If you use a vial a month, that’s 12 times 400. That’s about $5,000. If you use it for 20 years, that’s a lot of money. Is that one of the things that you market that this can save countless dollars and do I have to use your product, does it cost $100,000 for your product, does it cost 30 cents for your product? What’s it going to set me back as far as my dollars and cents?
Amin Zayani: It’s funny you mention this because it’s completely different from one market to another. In Europe most people get their insulin paid by the social system. In case of a doubt, they toss it, they get a new prescription, it costs them nothing. So that financial incentive is not as present as in the US. That’s probably why we do almost 80% of our sales in the US. It’s because of this. Because people think, ok, this takes the uncertainty away, and that saves me a vial or a pen a year, it pays off for itself. That’s because our product is extremely affordable. It costs $49 for two sensors. People see the value in it immediately, especially if they had this experience or this situation before. If they were standing in front of their refrigerator or cool bag, or at any situation and they doubted, is this still good or not? They had to get rid of that doubt by throwing that vial or pen, which is really sad.
Steve Freed: I like your idea, more so because it actually saves the doctor’s time, because it takes away the question, is it the insulin. Go out and buy another bottle and let’s see. That’s always going to be the answer. This can actually prevent that from happening and take more immediate steps to take care of the problem, just like what happened with you. You can become insulin insensitive for a number of different reasons, whether or colds or flus or things like that. So, I applaud you for coming out with this. You saw a need and I can’t believe that insulin’s been on the market for over 100 years and yet you’re the first one after 100 years to come up with this problem solver. So, with that, I want to thank you for your time. I appreciate you being here and I wish you the greatest success and I’m sure we’ll be talking again.