Gaithersburg teen's app for diabetics waiting on FDA approval

Called T1D1, the app took off. It was downloaded more 45,000 times. 13-year-old Drew Mendelow’s doctors were even recommending it to other patients. That is, until 2021, when the app – which did not have clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – was taken down.

WASHINGTON - Back in September of 2020, 13-year-old Drew Mendelow was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.

"All the doctors giving me a lot of information," he’d recall a couple of months later. "I was feeling very overwhelmed."

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Mendelow would need an app to help keep track of things like insulin doses and blood sugar, but his doctors told him options were limited.

"Some of them have a fee, some of them have ads, some of them don’t allow you to use different doses at different times of day," Dr. Brynn Marks with Children’s National Hospital explained at the time.

But Mendelow, the 13-year-old patient, took it from there.

"From the day I got home from the hospital, I started working on my own app," he told Fox 5 back in November of 2020.

Called T1D1, the app took off. It was downloaded more 45,000 times. Mendelow’s doctors were even recommending it to other patients. That is, until 2021, when the app – which did not have clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – was taken down.

Now a 17-year-old soccer player at Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg, Mendelow has been working towards gaining FDA approval ever since. He secured some private funding, the app’s been redesigned, but there is still one more expensive step.

Mendelow said he needs to complete a human factor’s trial. As a result, he started a crowdfunding campaign, in hopes of ultimately gaining FDA clearance and keeping T1D1 free.

"My whole motto with the app is I want to keep it free without any ads, I don’t want to benefit at all off of it, and this is solely purposed to help other people with Type 1 diabetes," Mendelow told Fox 5.

His goal is to have the app back up and running by the end of the year.

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