Novo Nordisk shines among drugmakers

Although many big players like Pfizer, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline have gone backward this year, Novo Nordisk (NYSE: NVO) is emerging as a star, according to Steve Goldstein of MarketWatch. While the pharma giants face generic competition, shrinking pipelines and price pressures, the Danish drugmaker has a market capitalization approaching $39 billion, annual revenue of nearly $10 billion and 29,000 employees. Goldstein explains that Novo is profiting as increasing number of people develop...

American Idol Contestant Crystal Bowersox — Doing Her Thing with the ‘Betes

Like Jessica over at A Sweet Life, I have to say that Crystal Bowersox is hands-down my favorite American Idol contestant this year, and not just because she has diabetes.  She’s just cool. She wears dreadlocks, and plays guitar. People call her “Mama Sox” because she has a one-year-old son. (They call her “Mama” and...

My (Most Excellent) Life as a Pancreas

Funny what you find when you clean out your closets. As I was sorting through some of the piles of diabetes-related materials in my office last week, I uncovered this cheery-looking little book called “My Life as a Pancreas” by Priscilla Call Essert: Someone had sent it to me for review a while back, and I...

Sizing Up the Solo

Show and Tell today, Friends! I received my demo kit of the Solo tubeless insulin pumping system the other day. That’s the would-be competitor to OmniPod which was acquired by Roche Diabetes last month. It’s not yet on the market — in fact, not slated to be available until 2012, but you can order a free sample...

2010 DiabetesMine Design Challenge: Closing for Entries Tonight!

The 2010 DiabetesMine Design Challenge closes for entries at midnight tonight!  What? You didn’t expect me to post about anything else today, did you? I’m afraid I can’t really think about anything else right about now.  Too excited to see what happens when the clock strikes twelve… So at the risk of sounding repetitive — in...

Mastering Those Carb-Guessing Skills

I loved D-psychologist Jessica Bernstein’s assertion that aiming to control your blood glucose levels with diabetes is a lesson in frustration. Rather, the best we can hope for is to influence our BG “by combining enough insulin and exercise to burn the sugar,” she says. Right on, Jessica! — which is I’ll talk about...

Jessica Bernstein: Rethinking Diabetes from the Ground Up

Jessica Bernstein wants to take “control” out of the diabetes vocabulary. So read the headline when she was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle last week. Jessica is a San Francisco Bay Area psychologist who was diagnosed herself with type 1 diabetes when she was just a year old. She’s spent much of her...

Balancing Pregnancy with Diabetes: the Book + the Interview

Cheryl Alkon, journalist and D-blogger at Managing the Sweetness Within (pictured right) has written the book that many a would-be-mom with diabetes has been waiting for: an ‘insider’s guide’ to having a baby with this illness. Titled Balancing Pregnancy with Pre-existing Diabetes, it covers the whole pregnancy experience, from the months before you begin trying...

Roche Acquires Medingo Solo Patch Pump: Begin the ‘Usability Wars’?

I’m sure many of you heard the news yesterday that Roche Diabetes has acquired Israel-based Medingo, makers of the much-anticipated Solo insulin patch pump — a would-be direct competitor to the OmniPod tubeless pumping system. Roche paid $160 million for the small company and its technology, which is a drop in the bucket in industry terms....

Tuesday Tickle

Last week, my husband and I took the whole gang — three kids plus my oldest daughter’s best friend — on a roadtrip down to LA for Spring Break.  Seven hours in the car is never a great experience, but now that their ages range from 7-12, it’s getting much less painless. (No one barfed! Not...