Highlights from ATTD2026

Last week I made a last minute decision to fly to Barcelona for the ATTD 2026 conference. This is the 4th time I have joined the conference and it is one of my favourites.

Here are some highlights from the event 👇.

⭕ Commercial systems are moving towards fully closed loops (hooray!) with CamDiab announcing CamAPS Liberty and MiniMed giving an update on its new Vivera algorithm in the pipeline.

👁️ I had retinal screening by iCare with no dilation drops and instant results. I would love it if this became standard of care in England, but is this just a nice to have or is the business case strong enough to justify the upgrade? It seems to me that the cost and inconvenience of the current method is mainly on the patient end (can't drive, can't look at a screen for hours so can't work, need someone to take time off to drive me) - I'm not sure whether we'll see innovations like this penetrate in systems where the current systems are deemed to be good enough.

🩸 Martina Rothenbühler's research into menstrual cycles and automated insulin delivery. Check out the TIMES study. Supported by Diabetes Center Berne, this work only gets done when researchers actually listen to women with diabetes. The gap still remains: funding for research to inform care of women with diabetes during perimenopause and menopause. This needs to be higher up the priority list! 

✅ Beyond Diagnostics AG, winner of the Diabetes Tech Tank Award as part of ATTD Ignite, and a company building a test to tell you whether your insulin has expired. Love this - a real problem and patient led innovation!

💉 More talk this year about GLP-1s as adjunct therapy for people with T1D. This is already going on under the radar (and has been for a while) despite it being off label use for T1D at the moment. 

🧠 AI in diabetes care was a hot topic across multiple areas - with scepticism about safety and usefulness as well as optimism about what it could do to support care.

🪄 More developments in cell and gene therapies trying restore insulin production and avoiding the need for immunosuppression.

🫂 The best part: walking into a bar and seeing people I've met at diabetes conferences in San Diego, Berlin, Amsterdam, Florence and Vienna. People who live in my phone and I don't get to see very often. AI has got so good at summarising conference content that this time I spent less time in lecture halls and more time with the community. It was the most human ATTD I've had.

I always ask myself at this conference - how much of what is being built or researched is actually going to help the people it's meant to serve? That gap is where I am spending most of my time working on now.

If you missed the conference you can catch up on all the content on the ATTD podcast on Spotify. It's actually really good. 

ATTD 2027 is in Paris - I'll be there!