Cellnovo's Mobile Health Approach to Diabetes Care

Article preview from In-Vivo- December 1, 2010

Cellnovo is working smack at the intersection of two of the hottest areas in medtech: diabetes and mobile health. Aiming to be the iTunes of diabetes care, the firm hopes to transform today's piecemeal management of the disease. The private company has developed an integrated platform designed to ease the burden for patients with type 1 diabetes, their physicians and their families. Cellnovo's system integrates a blood glucose meter, an insulin pump, and a simple interface that makes it easy to gather and share among all interested parties the many parameters associated with diabetes care: diet, level and frequency of blood glucose readings, insulin delivery profiles, degree of physical activity, and health status, for example. Indeed, because success in type 1 diabetes care heavily depends upon the compliance and adherence of patients to numerous daily tasks as they try to live normal lives, the disease is a good test case for the first end-to-end, patient-centric solution.

Cellnovo's Mobile Health Approach to Diabetes Care

Article preview from In-Vivo- December 1, 2010

Cellnovo is operating at the confluence of two popular areas of investment: diabetes and mobile health.

Established product companies are being challenged to fit their core products and business models into the connected systems of mobile health. But with no such legacy issues, Cellnovo built, from the ground up, an end-to-end solution for diabetes care.

Cellnovo has developed its own medical device, a novel insulin pump, but it thinks very differently than traditional medical products companies about solutions to the problems diabetes poses.

Thus, it has in parallel built service aspects around the product and factored that investment into its cost of goods. In that and other aspects, Cellnovo sees itself more as the iTunes of diabetes than a medical device company selling a new widget.

Two of the highest priorities for innovation among both medical device and pharmaceutical companies are diabetes and mobile health. The former presents a great societal need, because of the burdens its co-morbidities place on health care systems, and a large market opportunity because of the sheer size of the patient population. Across the world, 285 million people have diabetes and that number is expected to double within twenty years. ( See Exhibit 1.) At the same time, product companies and investors are looking to mobile health as an information-age solution to the old problem of disease management, the ongoing and multifaceted care of chronic diseases which, because it largely takes place outside of professional care settings, is left in the hands of patients. Old-style disease management never really took off because its service-based models generally added extra layers and costs to patient care, rather than making it more efficient. But now, companies are looking to the consumer electronics and telecommunications industries – to cell phones, wireless communications networks, and the internet – for new ways to connect disparate aspects of care and patients, providers, and their families to deliver better, and even more efficient, less costly, care.

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