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/