How a Holocaust survivor transformed blood sugar testing

Scientists and podcasters discuss how a scientist saved from a World War II concentration camp became a prolific inventor and revolutionized diabetes care

Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute scientists Ani Deshpande, PhD, and Pamela Itkin-Ansari, PhD, recently released the fifth episode of their podcast exploring groundbreaking discoveries in science and medicine.

The new episode introduces listeners to 92-year-old Adam Heller, PhD, a Holocaust survivor, scientist and engineer who helped change how patients suffering from diabetes test their blood sugar levels. Diabetic patients have had to draw small samples of blood, often from the tips of their fingers, as often as five times a day to monitor their blood sugar since self-testing technology became available in the late 1970s. In 2000, Heller invented a painless continuous glucose monitor (CGM) that did not require patients to draw and test their own blood to calibrate the device. His inventions became the core technology of the FreeStyle Libre^TM, Abbott’s CGM that entered the U.S. health care market in 2018.

In addition to simplifying self-monitoring for patients and providing more comprehensive data to physicians, studies have shown that diabetic patients with CGMs have lower hemoglobin A1c levels and less frequently have blood sugar concentrations that are too low or too high. Data from industry estimates that 2.4 million patients were using CGMs in 2023. The adoption of CGMs is likely to increase quickly as the market for these devices is expected to nearly triple by 2031, in part due to the Food and Drug Administration approval of the first over-the-counter CGM in 2024.

In March 2025, Deshpande and Itkin-Ansari launched The Discovery Dialogues Podcast. We sat down with them in May to learn about what motivated these scientists and podcasters to create a podcast and focus their first series on diabetes.

Their new episode is available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.