Imagine a tech gizmo that flopped. Your favorite “failure to launch,” if you will.

And now, imagine a technology that changed the world — something so groundbreaking that you can’t believe people ever lived without it.

We’re guessing you picked two very different things. But try to imagine this: Somehow, both scenarios apply to Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre, which turned 10 years old in 2024.

Right now, millions of people around the world use Libre’s continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) technology to manage their diabetes — a true breakthrough in the healthcare world, and the world at large. In 2022, the Galien Foundation named FreeStyle Libre technology the best med-tech innovation of the last 50 years.

But, before all of that, it looked like one of those aforementioned flops, destined for the scrap heap.

“Libre’s success story started as a failure,” said Robert Ford, Abbott’s chairman and CEO, who was on the ground floor for the entire journey. “We often dismiss failures, but, for me, they’re the greatest source of learning. In this case, failure led us to a life-changing breakthrough.”

How did that incredible transformation occur? Let’s dive into the first chapter of FreeStyle Libre’s history.

First Attempt Falls Short

Before there was Libre, there was FreeStyle Navigator, Abbott’s first attempt at a CGM.

Navigator had been in development for years, and our excitement for its debut was palpable.

To understand why, you need to understand what people living with diabetes traditionally have had to do in order to protect their health.

Diabetes is an chronic disease that affects your ability to make insulin and regulate glucose (one of the body’s main sources of energy). Left unmanaged, glucose levels that run too high or too low can turn life-threatening.

Before modern-day CGMs existed, testing your glucose levels involved pricking the ends of your fingers over and over, day after day. You’d do that to draw blood and squeeze it out onto a test strip that was inserted in a meter. It’s a practice many still rely on today.

Fast-forward to now: Our CGMs today include a biosensor that stays on the body discretely and painlessly,¹ reading glucose levels in real time and transmitting the data to a smartphone app or reader.

All of this explains our sky-high hopes back in the early days of developing Abbott’s CGM technology.

In 2004 we took our first significant step by purchasing a med-tech company called TheraSense, which was working on the revolutionary “wired enzyme” technology that would one day be used in Navigator. That set the stage for Navigator’s debut in 2008.

And the reality was this: Although Navigator was every bit the tech breakthrough we hoped for, it was “clunky, bulky, difficult for people to use, and it cost a lot,” Ford said. “It wasn’t a sustainable product.”

By 2011, we made the difficult decision to phase it out. “We did something that’s hard for companies to do,” Ford said. “We admitted defeat.”

It could have been an ending, but we weren’t quite ready to close the book. And it’s a good thing we didn’t: The next chapter would bring about a profound change.

The Insights that Changed Everything

Something kept nagging at us.

Amid the soul-searching we did in the aftermath of Navigator, there was still a lingering feeling that we weren’t done.

We couldn’t deny what we heard from enthusiastic doctors, from people whose lives had improved. One mom described how Navigator, by helping her young son with Type 1 diabetes, allowed her to sleep through the night for the first time since his diagnosis.

Navigator showed we were on to something, but “close” just wouldn’t cut it. Small adjustments wouldn’t be enough. The real transformation took place when we acknowledged the need to completely reimagine our CGM from the user’s point of view.

Another piece of feedback we got at the time resonated deeply: “The disease is silent, but managing it is noisy.” What good is innovation if it adds noise?

Our second attempt at building a CGM was more than a redo. It was a reinvention. We began by adopting a new design process that put three things at the center of our work across Abbott:

• Ease of use
• Accessibility
• Affordability

The FreeStyle Libre era began with those principles firmly in place.

Libre Revolutionizes Diabetes Care

After rounds of prototyping and years of hard work, FreeStyle Libre debuted in Europe in 2014 to strong demand.

Christopher Scoggins, senior vice president of commercial operations and marketing for our Diabetes Care business, remembers the debut: “After rounds of prototyping and years of hard work, the launch of FreeStyle Libre was met with overwhelming demand. Web shops quickly hit backorder, confirming our innovative design principles and underscoring our unwavering commitment to customer needs.”   

FreeStyle Libre retained the game-changing wired enzyme technology of Navigator but made it more consumer-friendly in several ways.

One significant improvement was reducing the dimensions from approximately that of two AA batteries to less than half that size.³ Today, our FreeStyle Libre 3 system’s sensor is the world’s smallest and thinnest,² about the size of two stacked pennies.³

By design, Libre was also easier to use, much less expensive to manufacture with enhanced precision, and could be worn for longer.

Along the way, real-world and clinical studies showed that monitoring glucose with FreeStyle Libre systems helped people lower their HbA1c levels.^{4, 5} They also pointed to a decrease in diabetes-related complications and hospitalizations for people using FreeStyle Libre systems.⁶

In these and many other ways, Libre helped us realize the vision we had from the beginning.

And with that … this story is still not over. We’re dedicating the next chapters to expanding on Libre’s breakthrough to help as many people as possible.

For example, how about a dual senor, one that can measure both glucose and ketones? That’s in our development pipeline — and important because it could help people who are at risk for a life-threatening complication of diabetes called diabetic ketoacidosis.

We’re also bringing forward more insights from our research into glucose, including our Lingo personalized metabolic coach.

All of this despite what looked like certain failure so many years ago. But flops are temporary. Good health is built to last.

References

¹ Haak, Thomas, Hélène Hanaire, Ramzi Ajjan, Norbert Hermanns, Jean-Pierre Riveline, and Gerry Rayman. "Flash glucose-sensing technology as a replacement for blood glucose monitoring for the management of insulin-treated type 2 diabetes: a multicenter, open-label randomized controlled trial." Diabetes Therapy 8 (2017): 55-73.
² Among patient-applied sensors.
³ Data on File. Abbott Diabetes Care.
⁴ Leelarathna L et al. Intermittently Scanned Continuous Glucose Monitoring for Type 1 Diabetes. NEJM 2022;387:1477-1487. https://www.doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2205650     
⁵  Evans M et al. Reductions in HbA1c with Flash Glucose Monitoring Are Sustained for up to 24 Months: A Meta-Analysis of 75 Real-World Observational Studies. Diabetes Ther 2022;13:1175-1185. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13300-022-01253-9
⁶ Miller et al. Flash CGM Associated with Event Reduction in Nonintensive Diabetes Therapy. AJMC 2021 27:e372-e377. https://doi.org/10.37765/ajmc.2021.88780