For those of you out there still wishing for an better inhaled insulin solution there just might be hope yet. Or at least as long as Alfred E. Mann can help it. He believes in it so much he is going to invest $966 Million of his own money.

“I believe this is one of the most valuable products in history in the drug industry, and I’m willing to back it up with my estate,”

NYT has a great article/interview in whch they talk to Mr. Mann about it, discuss Pfizer’s 2.8 billion dollar Exubera inhaled insulin failure and what things are to come.

The product, called Technosphere Insulin (They made the inhaler slightly larger than a cell phone), holds promise they say:

“The distinguishing feature of Technosphere Insulin is that it goes to work faster than any other insulin on the market, even so-called fast-acting injected insulins. That could be better at helping control the spike in blood sugar levels that occurs after a meal.

Technosphere Insulin also finishes its work of helping the body use glucose in two or three hours, faster than other products. That might reduce the risk of dangerously low glucose levels several hours after a meal – a big concern for diabetics.”

It certainly sounds interesting, something I might even use if they put it in a portable, easy to use device that doesn’t look like a gigantic bong. But I think Mann has identified that as one of the huge mistakes that Pfizer made and has learned from it He says Pfizer’s Exubera was:

“an expensive way to fairly inconveniently deliver insulin in a manner which has no clinical advantage.”

Like many of the other drugs there still has to be a ton of testing done before its available. But it might be something to look out for in the future.

Read the full article at the New York Times: Betting an Estate on Inhaled Insulin

We’ll be rolling out a few small features soon. Here are a few notables:

• Added calendar based date selection in the sidebar
• Today and Yesterday links will always take you there based on your timezone
• Messaging has been slightly tweaked for quicker reading and replying
• Added carb averages per meal per day for premium users
• More intuitive date labeling for multi-day statistics
• dozens of other small bug fixes

Twitter.com and SugarStats.com Integration!

Another cool thing is Twitter integration, now you can input sugar and med entries directly from Twitter via the twitter website, SMS, IM, within Firefox and all the other great 3rd party Twitter utilities. Find the full details on our Twitter help page.

Email Input Format Modification

An important thing to mention is we’ve standardized the input format quite a bit so now inputting via Twitter and Email takes exactly the same format. Before you had a separate med email you had to specifically send mail to, now you just have one but you have to slightly modify the format of the entry.

Learn more on our email Input help page