Adam Heller

Adam Heller was born in 1933 in Cluj-Napoca

Adam Heller was born in 1933 to a Jewish family in Cluj, Romania. In 1944 his family's property was confiscated and they were moved to the Kolozsvár Ghetto. Heller and his close family survived on Kastner's train, and he reached Mandate Palestine in 1945.

He earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the Hebrew University in 1961, studying under Ernst David Bergmann. He then did postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

In 1973 he and his colleagues introduced the 3.6 V lithium thionyl chloride battery, which has a shelf life of over 20 years. In 1996 he co-founded TheraSense with his son Ephraim, and in 2000 the company launched a blood glucose meter that needs only 300 nL of blood. Abbott Laboratories bought TheraSense in 2004 for $1.2 billion.

Between 1987 and 2010 he developed electron conducting hydrogels that wire enzymes to electrodes. This work led to prototypes of implanted continuous glucose sensors, used in the FreeStyle Libre system. He is Chief Science Officer of SynAgile, which works on oral L-DOPA delivery for Parkinson's disease.