Nemaura's sugarBEAT non-invasive glucose monitor shows comparable accuracy to invasive competitor in volunteer tests

Nemaura Medical Inc (NASDAQ:NMRD), the company behind the non-invasive continuous glucose monitor (CGM) sugarBEAT, reported positive initial user volunteer data from a head-to-head comparison against another major CGM device.

The aim of the tests was to determine whether using sugarBEAT intermittently can achieve the same long term health benefits as using an invasive CGM device daily and doing so at a lower cost.

The sugarBEAT device presented comparable accuracy to an incumbent invasive CGM device, which requires users to prick their fingers. 

Traditional invasive CGM devices have sensors with a wear time of up to 14 days, whereas SugarBEAT utilizes a single day sensor. That means sugarBEAT’s sensors can be spread out over a longer period on whichever days patients choose.

This ultimately reduces costs for both patients and insurers, the company said. “If we can achieve the same long term clinical outcome using a CGM on non-consecutive days, we can dramatically reduce the cost of managing Type 2 diabetes, as well as increasing the number of people that can be treated and managed,” the company said in a presentation.

READ: Nemaura Medical CEO Faz Chowdhury to give insights into sugarBEAT study in new interview

“The primary objective of these user studies comparing sugarBEAT with marketed CGMs was to demonstrate that similar long term clinical outcomes can be achieved irrespective of whether CGM is used every day of the month or only on a few days of the week or month,” Nemaura CEO Faz Chowdhury said in a statement.

“We believe that the implications of this would be that the annual cost per user would dramatically fall, making it affordable for the 90% of the diabetic population that are Type 2, the majority of whom do not require continuous daily monitoring, and those persons with Type 1 diabetes who are not currently using any CGM for whom having an occasional daily glucose profile would provide a powerful insight into the control over their blood sugar levels,” he added.

Of particular interest is helping patients improve their time-in-range profiles, which refers to the amount of time patients spend within a target range of glucose levels.

“Our overall goal is to empower users with data that helps them develop control over their glucose fluctuations and guide them towards improved time-in-range profiles to reduce the long term complications of diabetes and help potentially reverse Type 2 diabetes, and also help those with pre-diabetes from developing diabetes,” Chowdhury said.

“We believe that sugarBEAT is uniquely positioned to be able to achieve these goals, given that existing invasive CGMs are costly and do not have the flexibility of wear and resulting cost-advantage that we believe sugarBEAT provides.”

CGMs are big business internationally, with the global total addressable market for CGMs estimated at $82 billion per year. The figure consists of $12.7 billion for Type 1 insulin users, $38 billion for Type 2 insulin users and $31.4 billion for Type 2 non-insulin users, which make up 80% of people with diabetes. The numbers exclude the prediabetes population which is estimated to be nearly three times as large as the diabetes population, according to data provided by Nemaura.

Separately, Nemaura announced plans for a 2020 US launch of proBEAT, a product designed to help users improve their knowledge of how a range of lifestyle, dietary and health and wellbeing factors impact their sugar levels by deploying sugarBEAT to act like a black box flight recorder.

—Updated to include additional info from a Nemaura presentation—

Contact Andrew Kessel at [email protected]

Follow him on Twitter @andrew_kessel

Story by ProactiveInvestors