My name is Avery Weiss, and I’m a Youth Ambassador for Breakthrough T1D Northern California. I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (T1D) a month after my first birthday, 12 years ago.
Because I was so young when I was diagnosed, it was five years before I qualified for a clinical trial.
As soon as I qualified, my parents decided to enroll me into a clinical trial. I’ve done two clinical trials at Stanford, for different closed loop insulin pumps, the first one being Control IQ Closed Loop, and the other Medtronic 780g Hybrid Closed Loop. The goals of these trials were to find a more effortless, accessible artificial pancreas.
Because one of the trials took place in the pandemic, I had a slightly different experience than if I had done this trial before or after Covid. To prevent us from catching the disease, only one parent was allowed to take me for each check-in, and often we met outdoors at Stanford Children’s Hospital. The doctors in the study were Dr. Bruce Buckingham, Dr. Laya Ekhlaspour, and Dr. Rayhan Lal.
As part of the clinical trial, we would have multiple meetings, lab work, and 24/7 access to the care team. We would have to complete tasks as part of the overall testing of the closed loop system, such as tracking what we ate, our activity, our blood glucose levels, and our overall experience with the systems.
For both trials we would test the exact same meal four different times (no dosing, dosing a quarter, dosing half, and dosing the full amount of carbs) in order to test how the system responded to these different scenarios. We chose a Happy Meal. These trials were very fun, because not only did I get to be picked up early from school, but after we completed our appointment, one of my parents let me get food from a nearby restaurant, a treat for my cooperation.
It has been four years since the last trial ended, and though I cannot remember all of it, I still have some extremely important memories. I was diagnosed in 2014, and it’s impressive to see how much the technology has improved since then, and how we went from doing injections over 5 times a day to changing a pump every two to three days. This couldn’t have been possible without people participating in trials and seeing how well the new technology and systems worked, and without the doctors and participants who offered their time into making T1D a more manageable disease.
Learn more about T1D clinical trials and those recruiting in Northern California by visiting:
https://www.breakthrought1d.org/norcal/p/participate-in-a-t1d-clinical-trial-in-northern-california/https://www.breakthrought1d.org/clinical-trials/
Learn more about the Breakthrough T1D Northern California Youth Ambassador program. Applications open in June 2026: https://www.breakthrought1d.org/norcal/2025/09/23/northern-california-2026-youth-ambassador-hub/