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It was Lorenna Feliz Santos’ son’s ninth birthday when he started vomiting. But it wasn’t from too much cake and ice cream. After symptoms worsened, he was rushed to the hospital, admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit and diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

“It was a bit of a shock, no one in my family had diabetes,” Feliz Santos said. At the time, she didn’t even know much about type 1 diabetes, which is a condition where the pancreas doesn’t produce insulin. Type 2 is mainly lifestyle-related and develops over time, when the body doesn’t respond well to insulin, or make enough.

After a year of fumbling through the management of her son’s intense medical needs, hours researching digital health companies looking for answers and little support, she said she felt burned out.

In the U.S., there are roughly 6,500 endocrinologists, the type of medical specialist needed to treat diabetes — a relatively low number, Feliz Santos said. “Because we don't have enough doctors, people with diabetes are very dependent on connecting with each other, talking to each other and helping each other out,” she added. For instance, her doctor told go on YouTube to learn how to put a continuous glucose monitor on her son because a diabetes educator was unavailable.

She decided she needed to come up with a solution to help other people with diabetes and their caretakers navigate this complex diagnosis.

In 2020 she launched DiaM Life Inc., a startup in FAU TechRunway’s venture class 9, that has four components, or products, to facilitate care, education, and resources for people with diabetes. “We're building a unified platform that empowers and supports people with diabetes by bringing everything they need into a single unified system,” she said. “It’s a big undertaking.”

Being a part of FAU’s accelerator program has provided her with invaluable mentorship that far exceeded her expectations, she said.

Now, with Tech Runway’s guidance, DiaM Life is building the software to soon roll out four products that include everything from a clinically moderated social community platform, that connects users and provides up-to-date medical information, which is vetted by medical professionals, to a marketplace to find services and products, including mental health services, as well as access to doctors to provide them with real-time information. “Our goal is to give them information in real time, especially when there's an emergency or there's a situation that can lead to an ER visit, which is what we're trying to avoid and we're trying to avoid people getting complications,” Feliz Santos said, because “people don’t die from diabetes, they die from complications of diabetes.”

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