When Lane Desborough's 10-year-old son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2010, this chemical engineer did what came naturally: he applied industrial-scale automation principles to save his child's life. What followed sparked a movement that continues reshaping medical device innovation today. Lane's journey from creating Nightscout (one of GitHub's most-forked repositories) to founding the revolutionary "We Are Not Waiting" movement reveals how patient-driven innovation can outpace traditional development. Now, with support from the Helmsley Charitable Trust, Lane is building the Automated Insulin Delivery Interoperability Framework (AIDIF), an FAA-level simulator designed to accelerate innovation and expand access to life-saving diabetes technology for millions who can't "crawl through broken glass" to build their own solutions.
Timestamps:
[00:00] Opening: Personal hero who sparked a movement
[04:25] Why Lane entered medical technology
[08:20] Cross-disciplinary innovation and "exclusionary language"
[10:25] The "We Are Not Waiting" origin story
[14:00] The burden of being your child's pancreas
[21:40] From remote monitoring to open source revolution
[24:35] Scaling beyond the most engaged 10,000 users
[32:25] The Automated Insulin Delivery Interoperability Framework
[38:45] Why clinical trials aren't enough: recruitment bias
[41:20] Building FAA-level simulation for medical devices
[46:15] Medical Device Development Tools and regulatory innovation
[49:00] Heroes, help needed, and ecosystem engineering
Follow Shannon and Lane:
Connect with Shannon:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonlantzy
Website: https://www.shannonlantzy.com
Connect with Lane:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lanedesborough/
Website: http://www.nudgebg.com/
