Top 5 of best isotherm bags for the safe transport of medications

Meilleures solutions pour le transport et la conservation d'insuline et des médicaments sensibles !

Cold Alert - Frozen Insulin

With recent temperatures changes that are breaking all historical records, more and more people are faced with polar temperatures and are ending up with frozen medicines such as insulin, which must then be destroyed because they lose all effectiveness when they are frozen.

Insulin should be stored at 2-8°C, and once opened can be kept for about a month at a temperature below 25°C. Very few people realize that cold is much more dangerous for insulin than heat, because when insulin is frozen, destruction is immediate, whereas with heat insulin gradually loses its effectiveness. Insulin must be protected not only against heat but also against the cold.

"I just went up the Kilimanjaro in early November with a group of diabetics to raise awareness for diabetes (and also because it was a really fun thing for me to do). We managed to raise 12071 US$ for a diabetes association and were super happy about that. On the other hand, one of my traveling companions found himself at 6000 meters with his insulin frozen, because the temperatureit was -20°C. Luckily we had some spare unfrozen insulin so the problem was solved easily enough. When insulin is frozen it develops crystals and is no longer usable" explains Uwe DIEGEL.

Hot or cold: The storage of insulin

A public health problem

Bad habits of diabetics regarding the storage and transport of their insulin are one of the main reasons for the bad control of their blood glucose. A recent study in India shows that insulin stored between 32 and 37°C for 28 days loses respectively 14 and 18% of its efficacy, and that patients using this "outdated" insulin do not show a significant decrease in blood sugar levels compared to those receiving insulin stored at 5°C. Insulin that has been exposed to heat no longer has the expected effect in the treatment of diabetes.

Several studies have shown that during its storage and use, insulin is degraded by hydrolysis reactions and its molecular weight is transformed and becomes higher. It is therefore recommended that insulin vials or pens be stored in the refrigerator between 2 and 8°C and protected from light. In a 2009 pilot study in India with 131 type-1 insulin-dependent diabetic patients, 59% of the patients were hyper-glycemic, showing poor diabetes control. Of these patients, 56% maintained their insulin at room temperature.

Uwe Diegel on top of the world, raising money for a diabetic association

For Uwe DIEGEL, this is now one of the biggest problems in managing diabetes; "A person who suffers from a chronic illness such as diabetes is defined by his lifestyle and everything that hinders that way of life is perceived as negative. Very often, I see diabetics going out for dinner and simply putting their insulin in their jacket pockets, because they do not want to go out with their diabetes kit, which is cumbersome and embarrassing. This is the worst thing for insulin, which is suddenly overheated by the heat of the body and rises to around 35°C. At this temperature insulin degrades very quickly and therefore affects glycemic control”.

Solutions for diabetics

MedActiv, a global leader in drug delivery solutions, has addressed the issue of insulin from a user's point of view and developed the iCool and EasyBag bags to protect insulin against heat and cold . To develop these bags, a team of diabetics worked together to rethink and develop traditional methods of insulin transport. MedActiv was created by two well-known brothers in the medical industry, Dr. Olaf and Uwe Diegel, following an incident where Dr. Diegel's insulin was compromised during the summer of the 2003 heatwave in France. For this reason the two brothers pay particular attention to the quality and finish of their products so that they are intuitive to use, practical and beautiful.

"As a diabetic and a personal user of solutions for insulin transport, I was consistently disappointed with a lot of products I bought through traditional sales channels. It was obvious to me that the people who designed these products were not themselves diabetic and did not understand our constraints. We were happy to redesign the transport kits to make them perfect. The iCool and EasyBag solutions are designed by diabetics for diabetics "says Dr. Diegel.

Intuitive designs combined with a perfect understanding of constraints

iCool bags use a new generation of eutectic freezer-packs that do not perspire and have a longer defrosting point than traditional packs. Available in three different versions (Weekender, Prestige and MediCube), iCool bags keep insulin between 2 and 8°C for 12, 24 and 36 hours respectively. They also serve as storage for all diabetes accessories, such as glucometers and strips.

The EasyBags use a specially developed polymer that keeps insulin fresh for 5 days without electricity and that protects it against accidental freezing. To activate the EasyBags, simply immerse them in water for 60 seconds. The crystals in the EasyBag become a gel that stays cool for five days, relying on a process of evaporation. EasyBags will keep insulin at a temperature between 16 and 25°C for 5 days. At this temperature, insulin can be kept for about a month without any adverse effects. The EasyBag have become the global standard for the daily transport of insulin.

The iCool and EasyBag bags are available on http://www.medactiv.com

Alerte au Froid – l’Insuline Congelée

Avec les températures récentes qui pulvérisent tous les records de froid des dernières années, de plus en plus de gens se réveillent dans un froid polaire et de plus en plus de gens se retrouvent avec des médicaments congelés tels que l’insuline, qui doivent ensuite être détruits car ils perdent toute efficacité quand ils sont congelés.

L’insuline doit être conservée à une température entre 2 à 8°C quand elle est non entamée, et quand elle est entamée peut se conserver pendant un mois à une température en dessous de 25°C. Très peu de gens réalisent que le froid est beaucoup plus dangereux pour l’insuline que la chaleur, car avec la congélation, la destruction est immédiate, tandis qu’avec la chaleur l’insuline perd graduellement son efficacité. Elle doit donc être protégée non seulement contre la chaleur mais aussi contre le froid.

« Je viens de monter le Kilimandjaro au début du mois de Novembre avec un groupe de diabétiques pour sensibiliser les gens aux problèmes de l’insuline (et aussi pour me faire plaisir). Nous avons réussi à lever 12071 US$ pour une association de diabétiques et étions super contents. Par contre un de mes compagnons de voyage s’est retrouvé à 6000 mètres d’altitude avec son insuline congelée, car il faisait -20°C. Heureusement que nous en avions en rabe donc le problème à été résolu facilement. Quand l’insuline est congelée elle développe des cristaux et n’est plus utilisable » explique Uwe DIEGEL.

Chaud ou froid : Le stockage de l’insuline

Un problème de santé publique

Les mauvaises habitudes des diabétiques concernant le stockage et le transport de leur insuline sont une des principales raisons pour le mauvais contrôle de leur glycémie. Une récente étude en Inde démontre que l'insuline stockée entre 32 et 37°C pendant 28 jours perd respectivement 14 et 18 % de son efficacité et que les patients utilisant cette insuline "périmée" ne montrent pas de diminution significative du niveau de sucre dans le sang par rapport à ceux recevant de l'insuline stocké à 5°C.

L’insuline qui a été chauffée n’a donc plus l’effet attendu dans le traitement du diabète.
Plusieurs études ont montré que pendant son stockage et son utilisation, l'insuline est dégradée par des réactions d'hydrolyse et que son poids moléculaire est transformé et devient plus élevé. C'est pourquoi il est recommandé que les flacons ou stylos d'insuline soient conservés au réfrigérateur entre 2 à 8 °C et protégés contre la lumière. Dans une étude pilote faite en Inde en 2009 sur 131 patients diabétiques de Type 1 (insuline dépendants), 59% de ces patients étaient hyper glycémiques, montrant un mauvais contrôle du diabète. De ces patients, 56% maintenaient leur insuline à température ambiante.

Uwe Diegel et copains, sur le Kilimandjaro, à 5880 mètres d'altitude, pour une assiciation de diabétiques

Pour Uwe DIEGEL, ceci est aujourd’hui un des plus gros problème dans la gestion du diabète ; « Une personne qui souffre d’une maladie chronique telle que le diabète est définie par son mode de vie et tout ce qui entrave ce mode de vie est perçu comme étant négatif. Très souvent, je vois des diabétiques qui sortent dîner et qui mettent tout simplement leur insuline dans la poche de leur jaquette, par ce qu’elles ne veulent pas sortir avec leur kit de diabète, qui est encombrant et un peu embarrassant pour eux. Ceci est la pire chose pour l’insuline, qui se trouve soudainement surchauffée par la chaleur du corps et qui monte donc aux alentours de 35°C. A cette température l’insuline se dégrade très rapidement et affecte donc son contrôle glycémique ».

Des solutions pour les diabétiques

MedActiv, leader mondial dans les solutions de transport de médicaments, s’est penché sur le problème de l’insuline du point de vue de l’utilisateur et a développé les sacs iCool et EasyBag pour protéger l’insuline contre la chaleur et le froid. Pour développer ces sacs, une équipe de diabétiques a travaillé ensemble pour repenser et développer les méthodes traditionnelles du transport de l’insuline. MedActiv a été créé par deux frères connus dans l’industrie médicale, Dr Olaf et Uwe Diegel, à la suite d’un incident ou l’insuline du Dr Diegel a été compromise pendant l’été de la canicule de 2003. Pour cette raison les deux frères prennent une attention toute particulière à la qualité et à la finition de leurs produits pour qu’ils soient intuitifs à l’utilisation, pratiques et beaux.

« En tant que diabétique et utilisateur personnel de solutions pour le transport de l’insuline, j’étais systématiquement déçu par énormément de produits que j’achetais à travers les réseaux de vente traditionnels. Il était évident pour moi que les gens qui dessinaient les trousses isothermes n’étaient pas eux-mêmes diabétique et qu’ils ne comprenaient pas nos contraintes. Nous nous sommes donc fait plaisir en redessinant les trousses pour qu’elles soient parfaites. Les sacs iCool et EasyBag sont dessinés par des diabétiques pour des diabétiques » dit Dr Diegel.

Des designs intuitifs combinés avec une compréhension parfaite des contraintes

Les sacs iCool utilisent une nouvelle génération de plaques eutectiques qui ne transpirent pas et qui ont un point de décongélation plus long que les plaques traditionnelles. Disponibles en trois versions différentes (Weekender, Prestige et MediCube), les sacs iCool gardent l’insuline entre 2 à 8°C pendant 12, 24 et 36 heures respectivement. Ils servent aussi de rangement pour tous les accessoires diabète, tels que les glucomètres et les bandelettes.

Les sacs EasyBag utilisent un polymère spécialement développé par MedActiv qui garde l’insuline fraîche pour 5 jours sans électricité et la protège aussi contre le gel accidentel. Pour activer les sacs EasyBag, il suffit de les immerger dans de l'eau pendant 60 secondes. Les cristaux dans le EasyBag se transforment en gel qui reste frais pour cinq jours en s'appuyant sur un processus d'évaporation. Les sacs EasyBag garderont l’insuline à une température entre 16 et 25°C pendant 5 jours. A cette température, l’insuline se conserve pendant un mois sans effets contraires. Les sacs EasyBag sont devenus le standard global pour le transport quotidien de l’insuline.

Les sacs iCool et EasyBag sont disponibles sur le site http://www.medactiv.com

Paul Valery once said the “The future is not what is used to be…”. Our perception of the future is indeed altered everyday, continuously eroded by the fast pace of technological developments. The rapid expansion of new technologies is making it more and more difficult for us to predict the future.

Will tomorrow’s healthcare systems be truly connected, allying preventative and predictive medicine? Will this connection be truly useful for us, mere mortals who suffer from the foibles of personal and private behavior?

I’m personally not quite sure if this connectivity will be useful…

The Theory of All Things Connected

The Theory of All Things Connected is as follows: “Every year, on the 31st of December, we all take the same stupid decisions. What we call “New Year’s Resolutions” (this year I’ll stop smoking, I’ll drink less, do more exercise, be nicer to my sister, stop sleeping with hookers, etc…). However, we all know, in our heart of hearts, that these decisions are completely useless. We all know that come February, we’ll all be smoking again, eating again, insulting our sister, and we will have met Tatiana on Tinder…”

The Theory of All Things Connected says that Connected Health will bring a radical behavioral change; that it is one of the principles of Quantified Self that as soon as a person understands the signals of his body, he wants to know more and becomes interested in his health. The Theory of All Things Connected says that when you step on a connected scale and that you see that when you loose 200g you see you glucose levels go down, your blood pressure go down, your activity go up, etc it is much more interesting for the user of the scale and he thinks “Way cool” and gets more invested in his health, thus becoming an actor of his health rather than a mere spectator. That is the Theory of All Things Connected… Apparently it is based on a thing called “Health Micro Management” and will work quite well. Little decisions taken every day are much more effective than big stupid decisions taken on the 31st of December. So according to the Theory of All Things Connected, Connected Health is not a solution for all of us, but rather a solution for each and every one of us. It will allow us to offer truly personalized healthcare solutions, adapted for every single person. Connected Health will be Exclusively for Everyone.

Mmmmmh… seems a bit simplistic to me. Having worked in the connected health industry since it’s beginning, I am finding that users of connected health device are not yet better managed than those with unconnected devices. Just giving them information is not enough. If you actually think about it, information is not a driver for behavioral change. I’m pretty sure that most people who smoke don’t think that smoking is good for you. They know that smoking is bad, but yet continue to smoke. The question is, how can we maximize the impact of the correct information at the right time, so that changes of behavior become imbedded in the unconscious decision making process. I believe that this will be the role of the next generation of connected devices that will move from the “wearable” phase to the “forgettable” phase. The new generations of devices will integrate themselves into your daily lifestyle without you even realizing that they are there.

Everything you can imagine is real

We will not recognize the healthcare systems of tomorrow. Pablo Picasso used to say,“Everything you can imagine is real”. The problem is now that technology is moving so fast that we cannot even imagine the future.

When I was a kid we used to imagine a future where amiable and helpful robots would cater to our every whim, where civilization would be grandly automated according to the lofty ideals of Ayn Rand (Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values…) and where mankind would have a promising philosophical future.

This vision of the future is now compromised… It is compromised because of one simple factor, which is the evolution of human population. In year zero of our era, 2000 years ago, there was a population of about 200 million people on the planet. It took until year 1790 to reach a population of 1 billion people. Then it started climbing incrementally, and when I was born in 1965, there was a population on planet earth of 3.5 billion people. So in my lifetime of 50 years, we have more than doubled the population on earth to 7,4 billion people.

The first Supercomputer, the Cray, dates from 1974. It could handle three million floating-point operations per second (flops). An iPhone 6 is 1000 times more powerful than a Cray of 1974. So the calculation is evident. Today, there are 7.4 Billion people who have access to a device with computational power that is 1000 times more powerful than a supercomputer of 1974.

So technology is moving fast. I mean REALLY fast… So fast that it has become difficult to imagine the future, because innovation is coming from all sides.

One of my all time favorite books is 100 Years of Solitude, by Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The first paragraph is momentous: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

We are today in a world where technology is moving so fast that it is necessary to point at things all the time. Everything is new and we can no longer predict the future. It is terrifying. New fundamental technologies are arriving everyday. By fundamental I mean that these technologies will seem obvious in a couple of years, very much like internet seems an obvious part of our life. Nanotechnology, printing in 3D of body parts, Big Data, DNA, in a couple of years we will not recognize the technology of the future, indeed we will wonder how we ever lived without it.

Some of these technologies seem quite dangerous, because we are still applying our mores and expectations about the future to them. But this is normal, just a learning curve. We will need to learn to approach these technologies with finesse, with respect, with intelligence.

But I believe that intelligence is not enough…

I believe in Illumination.

Schopenhauer said that intelligence will allow you to hit a target no one else can touch.

I think that Illumination will allow you to touch a target no one else can see…

Indeed, it is for us to plan the future of mankind, because it is not yet written.

Uwe DIEGEL

www.medactiv.com

New diabetes travel guide from Australia

I just love it when people do wonderful stuff. Have a look at what MedActiv Australia has done with the A to Z of traveling with diabetes:

http://www.medactiv.com/downloads/Medactiv_Newsletter.pdf

A new solution for the safe transport of organs?

• The MedActiv Cooling Curve – 36 hours between 2 and 8°C
  A few years ago, MedActiv started developing solutions for the transport of fragile medications so that people suffering from chronic diseases such as diabetes, arthritis or multiple sclerosis could travel with their medication. Two brothers in France started the business after their medication was frozen in a hotel by accident. There are millions of people worldwide who are prisoners of their medication. MedActiv has become their partner with solutions that help them to travel while knowing that their medication is kept at exactly the right temperature.
  
  iCool MediCube – A new freedom for patients traveling with medication
  

   

   

  MedActiv has just released the iCool MediCube, which is a breakthrough in technology, keeping fragile medication between 2 and 8°C for over 36 hours. The iCool MediCube allows users to cross the world, knowing that their medication is kept at exactly the right temperature.
  Designing the iCool MediCube was a personal challenge for Dr Olaf and Uwe Diegel, the two brothers behind the MedActiv Company. So they worked together with a team of medical engineers and one of the world’s largest chemical companies to develop a new superabsorbent polymer that stays frozen for twice as long as regular gel packs. “With the MedActiv new formulation gel, we have managed to create a “phase change” material, which means that when it is frozen at a temperature of -18°C, it will change phase after about 7 hours of freezing to attain a new level of solidification and will then stay frozen much longer. This has opened new doors for us in terms of keeping our medication cool” explains Dr Olaf Diegel.
  
  

   

   

  The iCool MediCube was really designed for the traveler who needs to transport large amounts of fragile medication across the world. Measuring 20 x 20 x 20 cm, the MediCube has a whopping useable cavity of 2268 cm3, allowing patients to transport up to 20 pre-filled medication pens at a safe temperature for 36 hours.
  
  Despite it’s size (20 x 20 x 20 cm) and weight (2kg), the MediCube is not taken into account as part of your hand luggage, as the weight of the transport bag in which you carry your medicines is not included in the authorized limit for the hand luggage.
  
  Giving the gift of life…
  

  Every day 22 people die in the USA because they could not get an organ on time

  “This new MedActiv cooling gel has opened an entire new realm of possibilities for us to do research. We have already started research as to how we could apply this technology to the transport of human organs and blood samples. Just imagine a world where organ-transport patients could get organs from all over the world instead of relying on local supply. It might be a bit gory as a subject of discussion, but in the USA alone there are over 120 000 people waiting for organ transplants. Every day 22 people die in the USA because they could not get an organ on time. I don’t know yet what all the legal and logistics ramifications of this industry, but there has to be a way that we can apply this technology to make our world a better place.” says Uwe Diegel, one of the two brothers who founded MedActiv.
  
  About MedActiv:
  MedActiv is a global leader in the development of transport and storage solutions for sensitive medication. MedActiv products are designed to give users the freedom to travel knowing that their medication is kept at exactly the right temperature. As the chosen partner of major pharmaceutical companies worldwide, MedActiv is constantly pushing back the boundaries of this industry.
  
  For Uwe DIEGEL, creator of MedActiv, the company represents a personal investment. "In 2003, my brother almost died following an incident where his medication was accidentally frozen in a hotel. So I started this company because of reasons that are more of a personal nature than just business. MedActiv is for me the ultimate expression of innovation at the service of healthcare. If the MedActiv products are so popular, it is because they are designed by patients for patients and because we speak directly with users of the medications to really understand their needs. "
  
  For more information, please contact
  HealthWorks France
  6 rue de Castellane
  75008, Paris, France
  Tel: 01 42 66 15 59
  Mail: contact@medactiv.com
  www.medactiv.com