Continuous blood glucose monitoring and automated therapeutic closed loop medical device for intensive care units
Intensive Care Units (ICUs) require careful monitoring of blood glucose levels and insulin infusion to keep patients within safe physiological levels. Fluctuations of blood glucose are directly related to an increased risk of death and comorbidities. However, blood glucose monitoring (BGM) is still made by intermittent and manual offline analysis of blood samples. This technique proves inefficient (need 17% caregivers time), costly (€300 per patient) and increments mortality in hospital ICUs by 40% due to irregular glucose level adjustments upon measurements. After 15+ years of experience in developing glucose monitoring sensors, we at TRACE are taking on our next big step to penetrate the medical device sector with ContiTRACE: an AI powered automated non-invasive medical device for continuous BGM. Our patented ContiTRACE is able to measure glycaemic levels every 2 minutes (automatically) and automatically infuse insulin when needed. It is also capable of self-calibrating and has standardized body accesses, enhancing safety and minimising discomfort for the ICU patient. This will allow 1) caregivers to decrease their workload, 2) doctors to take informed decisions and 3) the healthcare system to optimize their limited human, economic and material resources by providing savings of more than 50% of BGM related cost. Our business model is twofold. We will sell the medical device (5 years lifecycle), and the consumables (max. 4 days duration per set) to private and public hospital ICUs. Our draft forecast (2022-2026) estimates profits of 14.4 M€ with a Return on Investment of 10.7 by the 5th commercial year allowing us to increase x10 our company headcounts in five commercial years. Although newcomers to the medical sector we have the support of key players among regulatory companies (Profil), manufacturers (Sasse Elektronik), pharma companies (Sanofi-Aventis, Pfizer and Roche) and distributors (Care Diagnostica) to take on the BGM challenge.